Genentech

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This is a Work-In-Progress. Feel free to edit!

Worked with Genentech (and Roche) as part of Blue Oxen Associates in 2010 and 2011. Teamed up with Kristin Cobble, Rebecca Petzel, and several others.

The project evolved and pivoted throughout. The initial question was how Genentech Informatics could be more proactive in supporting its customers (Genentech employees) in working more collaboratively and effectively. We structured a proposal that would enable us to run multiple experiments in parallel and track what worked and what didn't. However, even though Informatics was paying for us and all the support, we had trouble recruiting internal clients, largely because of time. It seemed like we were a solution seeking a problem.

So we pivoted. We decided to focus on Informatics itself. The leadership team identified global collaboration as its biggest challenge, so we decided to take an internal project that was working well and study it to determine what was working and what could lead to improvement. We used a combination of interviews, ethnography, and data analysis. Among our many conclusions and recommendations was disproving the leadership team's hypothesis that global collaboration took a physical toll on its participants, largely due to timezones. We discovered that this was not the case. Those working on the project had structured things intelligently so that most of the work was localized. There were three managers across the project and the world responsible for bridging the different teams. They did this effectively, and their bosses were cognizant of the timezone toll and supported them in working through that.

We were going to support Genentech in implementing these best practices across Informatics, but then our client got promoted to CIO of all of Roche. He asked us to join his consulting team to lead a division-wide change initiative, focusing especially on culture. We set this up and successfully facilitated a large first- and second-tier leadership team kickoff meeting in Basel, Switzerland. Unfortunately, just as we were getting ready for the followup work, the CIO suddenly resigned for personal reasons, and the project got canceled.