There are many types of leaders, many ways to lead.
“What kind of CEO do you want to be?” That question still rings in my head.
It came after a meeting with a CEO that I’d attended with my dad, one in a string of meetings to match small biotech and health tech companies with potential investors.
My dad, an investor, was letting me flex some muscle. I had hopped straight from earning a PhD in biomedical engineering to consulting at McKinsey – and now, I knew just the questions to ask: if it was a cell therapy or biologic, I’d hammer them on manufacturing or the regulatory process. If it were a device, I’d ask about IP or competition.
Over time, I noticed a pattern in the answers. If the CEO were, say, an MD, he or she would demonstrate less fluency with the financials. And if it were a lawyer at the helm, I’d note the micro-stuttering of a person for whom technology was a “second language” – in other words, someone who’d been taught (rather than having developed) the technology’s mechanism of action.
What I was intuiting from those meetings, it turns out, was the weak spot common to any technologically-based venture: the gap between technology and management, between science and business. This is a language barrier as formidable as any other. Like the gaps between other spoken languages, it blocks understanding within biotech companies, impedes their progress, and is difficult to overcome. Indeed, the deeper a company’s chasm, the more reluctant my dad was to invest.
