The management of process development in the chemical indstry is a highly specialized activity requiring skills and experience that crosses many disciplines. Many people doing such work today are practicing in a corporate environment where management structure and support services are already in place. Organization managers have a portfolio of standard operating procedures (SOP’s) and daily operation is a relatively straightforward matter of keeping the ball rolling. Individual work product contributes to a large project where many people and large streams of cash are choreographed to arrive at a well defined goal. Degrees of freedom are frozen out and the dominoes are carefully prealigned to topple to a particular spot.
Process Development Warning: Eventually you may have to shoot the chemist and get on with the project.
(Alright, it’s a joke)
In smaller organizations where individuals have greater personal influence, where money is less certain, and where fewer operational resources may be available, the end state of a technology-push project may be less certain. Choices relating to the details and specification of a product can be changed with greater ease than may be possible in a larger organization with many layers of management. This is both a benefit and a curse for the small business.
An organization that is not yet ossified with excessive management is one that may have the structural ability to adapt to the business environment with greater ease than one that is “over managed”. But this is conditional. A small business responding to market pull may have better survivability if it is flexible. A technology push organization that seeks to bring a new product or service to market may actually suffer from too much organizational flexibility.
Smaller organizations have to invent and implement management structure that constrains the dominoes to topple to a defined endpoint. This can be quite difficult for Explorer-Discoverer types to set into action. The key thing for technical people to consider when starting an organization is that placing an organizational person in the founding member group is critical to building management structure from the outset.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Organizational what? Management structures?
What’s the hot Vegas action????
Or is what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas?
I have to admit that I really don’t care for Las Vegas. It is constructed to bring out the worst is everyone who visits. It is also built in almost the worst possible place you can build a city. I vastly prefer DisneyLand.
Disneyland ruined the Haunted House and Pirates of the Caribbean (the latter in politically correct then corporate stages). Remaining fun is jumping an Autopia car off its track or hoping for a Buzz Lightyear tram freeze to run up a high score. The Anaheim urinals smell like cinnamon. Uncle Al would have gone for cumin, for verité given the local population.
Cumin urinal cakes. Hmmm. There is an idea whose time has finally come. Can you produce a prototype?
Cumin is one of the secrets to great chili and burritos.
Agree you need a good combo of technical and business people for companies to succeed. I have seen many biotechs that seems to have strength in one or the other during the early stages that can go on for years and when attempt to add the missing component later on is causes great friction that may side track progress temporarily or even permanently. Like any situation companies need systems but only as long as the systems work without interfering with mission.
I don’t like Vegas either and like your comment about what “character” it extracts from visitors. Uncle Al I remember the PC switch of Pirates and was very disappointed also. What happened with the Haunted House/Mansion? I have not been in several years and last time there was closed for repairs. I could only watch a portion of the related Eddy Murphy Movie as was so bad, did they make him one of the Ghost?
You overlook on very, very important aspect of organization – the Peter Principle. In big organizations, most middle managers are at the imcompetency level where they cannot go higher. They just muddle along in their inept ways.
This affects newer and smaller organizations in these times because these same people feel constrained or get reorged out and end up in the job market with those nice sounding titles of middle-level manager or project manager. They then bring there limited talents to the new job. Why do you see so many middle managers hop from company to company? It is not just getting more money and a bigger title (which is part of that game), but it also is fleeing the scene of the crime because an uproar is raised.
Why don’t you hear more about this pattern? What small company still needing incoming investment money is going to ever admit to any troubles?
Well, I didn’t exactly forget the Peter Principle. I was hoping to avoid speculation as to how it applied to me. 😉