James Clarke, Commercial Development
R&D Department I came to GlobalTech because it had a reputation for developing great engineers. And when I get here I discover they really develop scientists. It makes a lot of people feel good but I’m not sure it’s good for the company. We should be spending more time in development than research. The Problem We have strong personalities here and carefully guarded turf. Know what I mean? In the past, R&D’s challenge was to exceed military design specs. But now the dynamics have changed and the rest of the organization doesn’t know how to work with us. Budget Cuts Johnson’s cuts are killing us. We are supposed to be making a transition to commercial but the resources aren’t there to help us do that. And then Scott Bell makes sure that his projects are financed first, so I’m left to fight for scraps to feed commercial development. Thoughts on Teams Teams are the right thing to do. We need to find some way to work with Marketing and Manufacturing so that we can communicate problems and ideas more … effectively, I guess. The challenge is we’re bringing three different cultures to the table. We haven’t been very good at that. No, we’ve failed miserably at it. Scott Bell Scott’s a hell of a scientist, but not much of a manager. When Jennifer moved to be VP Technology I was surprised that Brian appointed Scott to be the VP of R&D. Don’t get me wrong; I’d want Scott on my development team any day: but not running it.
Your Role Lead Commercial Developer is a position created by Jennifer Smith, 6 months ago, before she was promoted out of R&D. She knew that Marketing’s requirements were not making it into the products we were designing. I’ve been working closely with Jennifer to bridge that gap. Departmental Relations It used to be that Marketing’s requests were laughed off the table. Some were outrageous I can’t argue with that. But slowly we’ve come to agreements on how the products should look and function so the friction with Marketing is decreasing, slowly. And we’re bringing Manufacturing to the table so we know what is doable. Commercial Market Our newest commercial product is due out in six months. That’s our first real attempt to integrate Marketing’s ideas into R&D. So, we’ll see. The toughest part is always getting resources and support in this department. Not many people like doing commercial development work. And that gets complicated by Scott who wants to approve every change and then we’re fighting for every dollar. It bogs everything down.
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