Limited training budgets pose a challenge for many lab managers. To meet their training needs we need to scrutinize both internal training programs and those offered by consultants and other external suppliers more carefully. Maintaining an effective training program now can lead to improved employee retention later when the economic outlook brightens and lea to competitive advantage.

Survey of training programs

The results of a 2009 Bersin & Associates study can provide some guidance for lab managers. Bersin & Associates is an Oakland, California-based research firm specializing in enterprise learning and talent management. They conducted an online survey of more than 1,400 organizations having 100 or more employees. In addition to the private sector, organizations included in the survey include local, state and federal government agencies.

According to Bersin & Associates, spending on training-related products and services, which totaled $48.2 billion in 2009, the lowest ever recorded in Bersin's annual report. Payroll for training staff members, which accounted for $27.5 billion of all training spending this year, plummeted 18 percent. Nearly $14 billion was spent on training products, consultants and other services, but that represents a one-year drop of 10 percent.

So if you have fewer training dollars to spend, how can you spend them more effectively? Some consultants charge for training workshops by the number of attendees. Lab managers can limit spending by controlling enrollment and making sure only those staff members who can benefit most by participating actually attend the workshop.

Alternative training programs

There are alternatives to traditional training workshops held in class rooms with one or more instructors in the room. Online training is increasing rapidly. The Bersin & Associates survey indicated about one-third of formal learning was delivered online in 2009 compared to about one-quarter in 2008.

Some large employers have developed online training workshops and courses. These are often essentially a sound track and series of PowerPoint slides. Participants click through the slides at their own pace. There are also training programs available online, often for modest no cost. One example is the series of webinars offered by the American Chemical Society. In addition to webinars on job-hunting and career management, the ACS offers webinars and online courses on such subjects as running effective meetings and project management (http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=1103&content_id=W67_002212&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=970deb72-48a9-4e5d-9608-bd9cb5917fca ) plus continuing chemical education courses (http://www.proed.acs.org/ ) . There is also the ACS Harvard Business Courses (https://acs.learn.com/learncenter.asp?sessionid=3-7673499A-3D4B-42F9-A663-64294F8510C8&id=178419&page=47 ). These 42 online courses cover business subjects such as budgeting, developing business plans, decision making and marketing.

Live remote broadcasts are increasingly being used to eliminate the costs of long-distance travel to attend training. The software used usually allows workshop participants to ask questions.

Some suppliers offer DVD courses that lab managers can purchase and make available to their staff members. For example, The Teaching Company offers courses on critical decision making, the global economy and business law (http://www.teach12.com/storex/coursesdetail.aspx?ps=901 ).

Some companies will bring in consultants to present training programs and record them so other employees can view the workshop later. Lab managers should check with the consultants presenting workshops before they do this to assure that they don't object. Some will.

In conclusion, it's worth it to consider all your options before setting up training programs.

Lab managers don't have time to read or write unnecessarily long reports; nor do they have the time to write them.. Thick reports may look impressive but how many people are actually going to read them? So how can you write a concise report that conveys essential information needed to make decisions?

Begin with an outline

Lab reports and other business documents should be focused and clearly written. Beginning with an outline can help keep your first report draft focused and concise. Whether writing from an initial outline or not, outlining your already completed first draft helps identify paragraphs that interrupt or slow down your manuscript's flow. These sections need to be eliminated or repositioned. Because of your emotional attachment to your manuscript, these are often much easier to spot and delete when working from this second outline than from the manuscript itself. Preparing an outline of your completed draft can also help you shorten or otherwise revise reports for submission to journals or trade magazines.

Excessively long introductions can cause readers to lose interest. Background material places the subject of your article in context. It engages readers by helping them relate to your subject or characters. However, is all your background information really needed? Keep only that essential to your report. If you think large amounts of background material needs to be included, put this information in appendices at the end of your report.

Tactics to reduce report length

Unnecessary summaries often result when moving from one topic to anotherr or introducing an important piece of information. This summarizing in advance seems to be a natural tendency but one we can't afford if we want to produce a focused report.

Bullet or numbered statements save words by eliminating the need for transitions. In addition, they may be written as phrases rather than complete sentences. These are especially useful with sections of manuscripts that lend themselves to list formats.

Line editing

Now the time has come to narrow your editorial focus to individual sentences. Begin at the opposite ends of the manuscript. Introductions and conclusions often contain surplus sentences and phrases. Then extend your sentence revision to the rest of the manuscript.

Edit sentences for structure and clarity. Unless they add power and precision to your sentences, cut out adjectives and adverbs. Using active rather than passive voice usually results in shorter, more forceful sentences. Avoid using verbs that sound weak or hesitant such as "appear" and "seem."

Occasionally a compound noun such as "end result" will creep into your manuscript. Like compound verbs and unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, these often needlessly lengthen your sentences. So do prepositional phrases.

I always save earlier, longer versions of my manuscripts. Then when a manager asks questions or suggests adding information, I often can provide a rapid response with little additional work.

It helps to establish emotional distance from your manuscript before editing it down to size. This means scheduling your writing project so you can set it aside a day or more to cool before beginning your manuscript surgery. For longer manuscripts, I find it helpful to schedule a second editing session a day after the first. I'm more satisfied with the results than if I substantially reduce the word count of a long manuscript in a single session.

Editing checklist

The whole editing process is complex. So a checklist can help cut your report down to size. Here's mine:

1. Outline your manuscript before beginning to write.

2. Write your report following your outline.

3. Prepare an outline of your first draft. Use it to cut unneeded portions of your manuscript.

4. Ask yourself what background information can be removed?

5. Narrow your focus and edit the manuscript sentence by sentence for structure and clarity. Start with your introduction and conclusion.

The result is a manuscript that flows smoothly from one important point to the next leaving the readers agreeing with your conclusions and recommendations.

ACS national meeting programming holds much of interest to industrial and government lab managers and to academic researchers in their role of lab managers running labs and supervising research students. The ACS national meeting will be held August 22-26 in Boston. Slightly over 14,000 people attended. At the ACS Career Fair, 68 employers (of all sizes from large companies to quite small ones) recruited for 484 positions, mostly laboratory positions. ACS members using ACS Career Fair services number 1066. They attending job-hunting workshops, had one-on-one session with ACS career consultants to discuss and improve their résumés, and had mock employment interview session in which they were interviewed by an ACS career consultant. The short interviews were video recorded and the job hunter and career consultant reviewed the video to see how the job hunter could improve his/her interviewing techniques.

Symposium on Open Innovation sponsored by the Division of Business Management and Development

Unfortunately, many joint development alliances fail. Gene Slowinksi of the Rutgers University Graduate School of Management noted, "Managers must deal with the complexities of cooperatively developing intellectual assets, linking decision-making structures and building cross-corporate innovation networks. The difficulties in executing these processes can torpedo the effectiveness of joint development alliances."

Ronald Taylor of Intellectual Assets, Inc., that the intellectual property associated with an open innovation program must be carefully managed. "This requires careful alignment and appropriate negotiations of non-disclosure and joint development agreements, with timing that maintains intellectual property rights," he observed. "Moving too soon can expose the firm to contamination, but waiting too long can result in a loss of the fruits of the collaboration."

In addition to developing new products and processes, managers need to experiment with new business models without disrupting current operations, notes Saul Kaplan of the Business Innovation Factory. "Most organization leaders today have only had to lead a single business model throughout his or her entire career. And most haven't had to significantly change a business model in order to sustain the organization competitively. Organization leaders of tomorrow will have to change their business model several times over the course of a career and the successful leader will establish an ongoing process to explore new business models, even models that might threaten the current one."

ACS Division of Small Chemical Businesses

This division presented a symposium on how small companies can obtain funds from the federal government's Small Business Innovation Research program. Companies have obtained up to $5 million in funding. This programs supply finding that does not dilute an entrepreneur's ownership share.

Adjunct faculty often excluded from research

The Women Chemists Committee sponsored a symposium on the status of adjunct faculty members and the challenges associated with being one. A growing fraction of university faculty members are being substantially excluded from doing original research, supervising research students and managing laboratories.

Many of the growing corps of non-tenure track faculty are being excluded from these activities as well as the benefits of tenure. For example, Cheryl Lavoie of Simmons College noted that as a non-tenure-track chemistry faculty member, her duties include lecturing, tutoring, outreach, as well as correcting lab reports and supervising lab instructors. There was no mention of research.

Adjunct professors are often part-timers and work at two or even more institutions to earn an adequate income.

and much more

The Division of Chemistry and the Law presented a symposium of interest to lab managers as well as patent attorneys on what managers, business owners and professors need to know to begin safeguarding their inventions. Of particular interest was paper CLAW 32 providing advice to help guide inventors and lab managers to help them answer the question "Am I ready to patent this development."

Of course, there were also literally thousands of papers on various areas of chemical science and technology. One can keyword search the meeting abstracts, which are posted on the ACS website at http://abstracts.acs.org/chem/240nm/program/divisionindex.php

Increases in management practices such as outsourcing, hiring temporary workers and focusing on project-based teams is having an adverse effect on workers. They may also result in long-term problems for lab managers and other employers.

Employee job satisfaction affects employee loyalty, efficiency in the workplace and quality of life. "We spend a great deal of our time at work, so it is an important part of our lives," says Dr. Martha Crowley, an assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina State University who has done research on the subject. "If our work experience is unpleasant, it affects every aspect of our lives and ultimately it affects our ability to do our jobs."

The research study

While the study wasn't focused on laboratory managers or their staff members, it did focus on professional employees. The researchers examined data on working conditions, workplace relationships and worker behavior of professional employees over the past 80 years. They found that, over this period, employers increasingly implemented measures designed to increase profits. These include layoffs, outsourcing jobs, and replacing salaried employees with contractors. All of these measures have been widely implemented in laboratories in many industries over the past three years as responses to the recent recession. In addition, large-scale mergers in the pharmaceutical industry have resulted in these measures plus dissolution of entire research groups and even closure of large research centers.

"We found that, while these measures have succeeded in increasing performance pressure, there have also been unintended consequences," Crowley says. Many of these unintended consequences have an immediate impact on employees. For example, professional workers increasingly work longer hours to meet project timetables. If they are salaried employees, there is no compensation for the increased time they spend on the job. Indeed there may be less as some employers freeze or even cut salaries.

Effects on employee workplace behavior

As a result, many employees experience increased workplace stress. There is an increase in fear among employees that their job will disappear and a distrust of management. Greater stress can result in increased interpersonal conflict. Employees increasingly focus on their own individual situations rather than on that of their employer except as it affects them personally. The researchers found that professionals are less likely to help coworkers than in the past and to work together effectively.

All these factors reduce workplace efficiency. The quality of the work product also declines as workers settle for "good enough."

As a result of these business practices and their consequences, people tend to withdraw loyalty from their employers. This could have long-term effects. When the economy becomes more vigorous and grows more rapidly, companies will eventually begin to increase their hiring of scientists, engineers and technicians to work in their laboratories. With an improved laboratory job market, decreased loyalty among current staff members could result in increased current employee turnover. While employers may offer incentives to stay on the job, the memory of the previous months or years of stressful laboratory workplace conditions may result in these offers being ineffective.

These stressful work conditions caused by changed workplace practices also may reduce employees' commitment to their employers' goals. "People are still doing their jobs and many are putting in a lot of hours," Crowley says, "but they are not doing the things they would do if they were passionate about their work." This behavior can persist despite a strong economic recovery.

Crowley concludes that employers should not rely on these workplace practices suggesting, "Treating your employees well can be a way to boost your profits and productivity simultaneously without generating the unintended consequences of tactics based on fear."

The recent demise of Chrysler's once popular PT Cruiser automobile holds important lessons for lab managers. A decade ago, Chrysler Corporation introduced its PT Cruiser. The car's retro styling immediately made it popular with both car dealers and drivers. It inspired imitators such as the Chevrolet HHR. PT Cruiser production could barely keep up with demand. All this gradually changed. Last July Chrysler manufactured its last PT Cruiser. Sales had declined from 145,000 in 2001 to just 18,000 last year. Back in 2001, What happened to kill the car?

The answer to this question holds important lessons for lab managers. What is the answer? Chrysler ignored its customers. Although car dealers (Chrysler's direct customers) and drivers (Chrysler's indirect customers) asked for things such as two-door and panel van versions, Chrysler failed to invest in the car to offer these options or change it beyond offering additional paint colors and a convertible top. With the loss of the once rich PT Cruiser profits, Chrysler paid a heavy price for ineffective customer relationship management.

Even in 2001, the PT Cruiser was considered a heavy vehicle with relatively low gas mileage. As drivers are demanded ever higher gas mileage, Chrysler never made design changes to improve gas mileage.

In short, Chrysler never updated the car to overcome its disadvantages or broaden its appeal. This and competitive threats from boxy, higher mileage vehicles destroyed the appeal of the PT Cruiser. The same sort of problem can confront instrument makers, drug manufacturers and even commodity chemical manufacturers. Their lab manufacturers are responsible for protecting their employers' markets. However, like Chrysler's designers, sometimes they are asleep at the switch.

Example – polyester raw materials

Early in my career I received a valuable lesson in the dangers of ignoring competitive threats until it's too late to retain one's markets. I worked for Hercules, then a major manufacturer of dimethyl phthalate (DMT), the raw material for polytheylene terephthalate (PET). PET is used to manufacture plastic soda bottles, water bottles, clothing made of polyester fibers and other products. Then Amoco introduced terephthalic acid (PTA) as an alternative.

The introduction of PTA was an ambiguous threat because its consequences for DMT producers was unclear at first. "When faced with ambiguous threats, organizations often tend to downplay or minimize the risks," notes Trustee Professor of Business Management Robert Rigoberto of Bryant University. Hercules appeared to do this. I saw lab managers dismiss the threat because PTA was a solid rather than a liquid. They were convinced that customers would prefer to handle a liquid product. However, with Amoco's help, polymer manufacturers soon learned how to handle PTA pellets in their plant. Suddenly it was DMT that had a major disadvantage: methanol was produced as a byproduct when polymerizing DMT but not when polymerizing PTA. Previously polymer makers had lived with the problem of finding markets for the methanol. They didn't have to do this when using PTA. Hercules was forced to buy back the methanol from its customers thereby reducing profit margins. Still storing methanol, loading rail cars, etc. was a hassle for polyester manufacturers. As a result, Hercules had to fight hard to keep its customers in what had been a growth market.

Hercules eventually got out of the business selling its plants to other firms.

Lessons for lab managers

So what is the lesson for lab managers? When an ambiguous threat appears on the horizon and you are unsure whether or not it poses a threat to your firm's business, consider the threat carefully. Study of the patent literature may help define its seriousness. If it is indeed serious, your firm has a window of opportunity to confront it before your business starts to suffer. For example, lab managers could have started a program to investigate making PTA themselves. Marketing managers could have immediately instituted a methanol buy-back program and persuaded DMT customers to sign long-term contracts. This would have given lab managers time to work on the problem before sales and profits began to decline too severely. Alternatively, Hercules could have acted quickly to get out of the business.

Before presentation software such as PowerPoint became almost ubiquitous, many presenters would give rambling, poorly focused presentations. Preparing 35 mm slides was often too costly and took too much time for internal presentations. So speakers wouldn't use visual aids and often "wing it" with little rehearsal. As a result, their presentations would be unfocused and disjointed. All this changed with PowerPoint and its competitors and the availability of projectors that take what's on a computer screen and project it onto a wall screen or the wall itself. Bullet point slides gave speakers a visual outline of their talk as their proceeded. This makes it much easier for them to give their presentations structure and focus.

Presentation also provides speakers and their organizations with a written document they can distribute to audience members or people unable to attend their presentation.

What else can oral presentation software do?

PowerPoint and similar software can also help you give other written documents more organization and focus. Hate to outline your reports and other documents you have to write? Instead of conventional outlining, you can use PowerPoint bullet point templates to organize your thoughts. You can use the main or leading bullet for an important subject or thought and subsidiary bullet points under the main point for supporting evidence and to explore the implications of your main bullet point. This is exactly what an outline does. However, many people find they prefer using PowerPoint or a similar program to do so rather than using a word processor to prepare an outline. Try it. You may find you prefer to use PowerPoint over conventional outlining as the first step in writing a lengthy report or other document.

PowerPoint instead of word processing

Indeed, you may even want to experiment with using PowerPoint to prepare an entire document for your firm's website rather than using a word processor at all. The bullet points of a PowerPoint document help eliminate excess verbiage that so turns off people reading document online. Inserting charts and diagrams can reduce the monotony of one bullet point slide after another.

After giving a well-received presentation to your managers, customers or at conferences, authors can post the presentation on their firm's website or intranet. This saves the author's time compared to preparing a text document in addition to the presentation. If your firm has a process requiring management and legal approval for documents printed or posted online, posting your PowerPoint presentation rather than a new document can streamline the approval process. Instead of having to approve two documents, they have only to approve the PowerPoint presentation.

Taking meeting notes

Being assigned to take meeting notes for all the attendees can be a pain. If their keyboarding skills are good, many recorders use a notebook computer rather than handwriting their notes. PowerPoint offers an alternative to word processors for this task. The bullet point structure enables the note-taker to spend less time keyboarding and more focusing on what is said. The final document, whether written using a word processor or PowerPoint, will probably be more concise.

If you can condense the most critical points made during the meeting to one or two PowerPoint slides, projecting these slides offer an excellent way to get everyone "on the same page" when beginning a follow-up meeting.

PowerPoint doesn't work best all the time

PowerPoint is often poor for explaining difficult concepts. Speakers have to rely heavily on their own verbal explanations. In this case, using a word processor is more effective in communicating these concepts and information.

Taking useful short courses and workshops can be a major factor in career success. While taking full semester courses is often helpful, many times this isn't possible due to time constraints of job responsibilities or family duties. Often full semester courses contain a lot of material that isn't focused enough to be of substantial help in meeting one's career goals. Short courses offer a useful alternative to longer courses and can be more focused with less demanding time requirements.

When one uses the term "short course," one typically thinks of intensive courses one to five days long and running six to eight hours per day. These are live presentations and may be held in a hotel meeting room or, if an internal corporate course, in a company meeting room. Instructors may be outside consultants, current employees or retirees. Workshops are more narrowly focused and shorter - sometimes as little as three hours in length.

Consultants may offer their own courses and workshops or teach onees offered by professional societies. Many conferences such as national American Chemical Society meetings and Pittcon offer short courses on both technical subjects and soft skills. Courses in soft skills, sometimes called people skills, may seem easier when sitting in a meeting room than are more technical courses. However, they are harder to put into practice. It is the failure of many attendees to do so that can result in a poor reputation for some short courses.

Other types of short courses

So far we've been talking about the traditional model of a short course or workshop: a live presentation in a meeting room. However, technology has made possible other types of short courses. One is the webinar. This may be a one-way presentation broadcast to your personal computer or, by using a telephone or online software, allow for two-way communication in which course attendees can ask questions.

Another alternative is the videoconference in which the instructor's presentation is broadcast to attendees in one or more distant locations. These locations are typically meeting rooms designed for videoconferences and having one or more large-screen video monitors. Two-way communication between the presenter and the attendees is possible. Some courses are available on DVD. Students may watch them at their leisure in their own homes. Several months ago I took a 12-hour DVD course, "The Art of Critical Decision Making" and recently watched the tapes again. This course has been useful in my own work and helped me better understood how things went wrong in the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Example

When I started working for Shell Chemical Company all new employees took three-day short courses in listening skills (in the context of conversations) and oral presentation skills. These have been among the most valuable courses I have ever taken helping me in my R&D, technical service and lab management positions. Outside the laboratory, effective listening skills have helped me as a volunteer American Chemical Society career consultant working with job hunters. It also helps when working with employed ACS members is dealing with on-the-job issues. (As a writer, learning how to listen effectively and actively has helped me when interviewing people for articles I am writing.) The presentation skills course has helped me in preparing and making in-house presentations, conference presentations, presentations to customers and job-hunting and career management presentations. It also prompted me to develop a workshop on preparing oral presentations when English is your second language.

Writing in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/ad/article/managingrisk-managing"), veteran business journalist Russ Banham notes, "In this era of globalization, few strategic initiatives are more global than a company's supply chain."

The "lean manufacturing" concept pioneered by Toyota and others emphasizes just-in-time delivery of raw materials and mechanical parts with minimal amounts kept in inventory. I recall reading that a one-day delay in delivery of Toyota parts from Japan can force shutting down the firm's Tennessee auto plant. However, the recession has forced many firms to reduce their internal costs. One way to do so is to minimize inventories of raw materials and parts and instead rely on suppliers to deliver them just-in-time.

There are other factors to worry about other than delays in delivery. What if the delivered parts or materials do not meet your firm's quality specifications? This is where the laboratory can play a major role in assuring on-time delivery of on-specification raw materials and parts.

The Production Plant Laboratory

The plant laboratory has long been the site where raw materials and parts were tested to assure they met specifications. However, this testing often took place after the materials in question arrived at the plant. Today it is more efficient to require that a representative sample be sent by overnight delivery for lab test testing. This testing must be carried out in a very expeditious way so that shipment can occur quickly enough to assure on-time delivery with no interruption or delay to the production schedule.

This requires that the plant laboratory have sufficient staff and the testing equipment needed for rapid and efficient testing. It also means that lab personnel have an efficient sample submission and tracking system that assures that samples are logged in as soon as possible after arrival and sent to the proper analyst or analysts for testing. In some cases, rather than wait for one analyst to perform a test and then pass the sample onto another analyst for a different test, these tests should be performed in parallel so the entire test series is completed more quickly.

Once testing is complete, either the analyst or a supervisor must approve the sample for shipment and so inform the supplier. This should be part of the sample shipment and tracking system.

It may be advisable to make the sample submission and tracking system accessible to the supplier. This enables anxious suppliers to track the progress of their sample towards approval.

The Central Laboratory

Should a central corporate laboratory play a role in this analysis and approval process? It depends. It may be that the testing instruments are very expensive. This equipment may be used only occasionally in a plant lab but frequently in a larger, central laboratory. Should this be the case, it may be more cost-effective to purchase only one unit of each piece of testing equipment and position them in a central laboratory. (Sometimes the reverse is true and equipment used only occasionally in a central lab will be used more frequently in a plant lab.)

Having two laboratories testing and approving a raw material or mechanical part can complicate sample tracking and approval. Systems must be designed so no ambiguity creeps into the approval process and the supplier is informed of approval – or non-approval – in a timely manner.

One factor that could make it advantageous to schedule as much testing as possible in the plant lab is that its personnel may feel a greater sense of urgency in performing the required tests than analysts in a central lab devoted in large part to R&D.

The pharmaceutical industry appears to be in the process of switching over to a different R&D model involving more outsourcing and less internal R&D than in the past. Perhaps a decade ago, pharmaceutical companies were outsourcing drug manufacturing stating that their core strength was new drug development. The current trend towards more outsourcing and less internal R&D is seen as a response to a major industry problem: big pharmaceutical companies have commercialized relatively few new drugs in the past decade.

Some blame this problem on extremely large research staffs formed as a result of the drug industry mega-mergers of the past ten to fifteen years. They suggest that large staffs have resulted in innovation-stifling bureaucracy. Another contributing factor may be changes in U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations for permitting of new drugs. Whatever the cause, the result has been what Chris Viehbacher, CEO of Sanofi-Aventis SA, has called a "lost decade" in terms of new drug development.

The big pharmaceutical companies, so-called "big pharma," have been reacting to the problem by reducing R&D staffing levels. According to Russell Reynolds healthcare recruited Jacques Bouwens, the ten largest drug companies have eliminated approximately 27,000 R&D jobs since the beginning of 2009. R&D staffing levels may continue to decline due in part to work force reductions and in part due to reduced hiring of young researchers. At one point in the 1990s, the pharmaceutical industry hired more than half of new Ph.D. chemistry graduates according to American Chemical Society surveys of new graduates.

Restructuring

R&D restructuring has includes more than just laboratory staff downsizing. Some companies have ended development of some types of drugs and dissolved entire research groups.

Entire large laboratories (chemical industry labs as well as drug industry labs) have been closed and sold or converted to other uses. An article scheduled for publication in the September issue of "Laboratory Management Magazine" will discuss some of these once shuttered large laboratories and the uses to which they are now being put.

GlaxoSmithKine provides a representative example. Since 2006, the firm has cut its global R&D staff by 20%. At the same time it has substantially increased funding of outside projects performed by small biotech firms and academic research groups About 30% of its drug discovery research is now contracted out to other firms (http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/88/i06/8806notw4.html).

As a result of extensive outsourcing, overall drug industry R&D spending has declined relatively little. New laboratory management and staff jobs are increasingly in contract research organizations and in biotechnology firms and small pharmaceutical companies rather than the major pharmaceutical firms.

Another approach being evaluated by some big pharmaceutical companies was discussed at length in a recent "Wall Street Journal" article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704569204575328580921136768.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLEFifthNews). Basically it involves carrying out new drug development in small teams of about a dozen people with support functions such as clinical testing, formulation development and manufacturing development being outsourced.

However, entrenched corporate cultures often are hard to change. For example, according to some reports, despite a change in 2006 – 2007 to a more safety oriented culture, many BP managers and staff members are still taking safety-related risks in order to minimize spending and meet deadlines. Even if excessive lab bureaucracy and its time-consuming requirements are eliminated or greatly reduced, some lab managers and staff members behave as if it is still there.