On New Year’s Day I was already dressed, but sleeping, when I got the text telling me where to be.

We had been partying at my friend’s house the previous evening when the year turned. This was Lausanne so I saw the year in an hour earlier than the folks back home in Newcastle upon Tyne.

In my darkened hostel room at 1am there were three other warm breathing bodies in the room so I took my pyjamas to the bathroom to change and snuck back in straight to my top-bunk bed in the semi dark. The other sleepers were kind the next morning. They were probably going ski-ing and wanting to leave early but nobody put the lights on, waiting until it was light outside to get up and showered and check out. But when the room had quietened I also got up, had a shower and fragranced myself and got dressed. Then I thought coffee? No… sleepy…. I climbed back up to my lovely, comfy bed and slept for 2 more hours.

At the youth hostel “Lausanne Guest House and Backpacker”, I had picked the top bunk of a double bunk like a child. From there – during daylight – I had a view out of the window across the tops of the fudge coloured, snow dusted buildings, down the hill, all the way to the huge Lac Leman. Theoretically I should have been able to see the mountains on the far side but it was always too hazy for that.

An interesting aside is that they do not give me a duvet cover. I was issued with a fitted under sheet and a flat sheet – just a long piece of unhemmed white cotton fabric as wide as the bed and longer than I am – which I used between myself and the duvet.

At around 11 my friend sent a succinct text message – “come for early lunch”; I stopped for coffee on the way – these little Swiss coffees are quite delicious.

When I reached her house she was still in her pyjamas but she was frying braising cooking. Onions, garlic, chilli, duck, tins of beans and bacon and sausages. She was making cassoulet because, she said, she had been wondering what she could make using just the ingredients that she had to hand. Her hands are generous. The chilli and garlic fumes in the high ceilinged kitchen were so intense that we had to open the windows and let the 1°C air in. I was coughing and the fresh air helped.

When we sat down to eat it was gloopy and fragrant and so incredibly tasty that I did not realise until later that this would become my new year’s resolution. To make cassoulet. Not to just make it from a recipe book but to understand it well enough that I can make it anywhere, any time.

Tonight I take the duck and pork out of the freezer. Put the haricot beans in to soak overnight. Here starts action.

Tomorrow I make cassoulet 1.

Another ten step high concrete stair section has floated by my window.  Multiple tubular reddish steel arteries protrude from the top and the bottom and the zombie grey concrete seems to wish that it is an artificial heart, that will come to life when the surgeons suture it into place.

This is the second day in a row that the crane on the building site next door is lifting stair sections into the hollow block – more concrete – the column at the centre of the new building next door.  The central tower is at least four floors higher than my eighth floor window.  This is the chest, the ribcage of the modern living space, built to protect the vitals.  I have to fight the urge to calculate how many flights of stairs are required to fill it.

Let’s say I study a ripe fruit in all its fragrant, traffic-stopping orange, knobbliness. And I say that these are the characteristics of an orange.  And if I want more oranges I search for them in blossoms; in fact I tell blossoms to look at themselves and ask the question – Do You have What It Takes to Be An Orange?

A lot of the evidence which is used about entrepreneurs is completely inadmissible.  Why?  Some people study entrepreneurs, their personalities and habits and psychological propensities.  This generalised data is then used to predict the characteristics that one must have before becoming an entrepreneur.  I have a problem with this method.

Blossoms look nothing like an orange.  Given the right circumstances –  food, water, fertilisation – all blossoms on the orange tree can become oranges.  In the same way it seems that – under pressure  – all people can become entrepreneurs.

An orange is an orange once it is an orange. A definition of an entrepreneur is someone who has started a business.  An entrepreneur is an entrepreneur once he/she is an entrepreneur.

What sort of pressure makes someone start a business?  Some types of entrepreneurs desperately want creative or research freedom and start their own businesses for that reason.  Some people have survival pressures and if they did not start their own enterprise they would not eat. Some do it with the slightly faked pressure of a business plan competition.  Usually, if you have done it once, you will do it again.

There is research that truly looks at large groups of people before they turn entrepreneur, and then tracks them to see whether they do, and looks to see what they had in common. The conclusion is that there are more differences between people than there are between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs.

Useful studies show which characteristics of entrepreneurs affect the longevity of their businesses.  Extraversion, emotional stability and agreeableness have no effect, openness to experience limits the lifespan of a company but conscientiousness is correlated to companies who last longer.

The Team.  An entrepreneur gathers the skills that he/she needs to get the job done and this relates to something that I hear entrepreneurs and funders and venture capitalists talk about.  Among the people on the team one must find people who can build and organise and create and analyse and have vision and convince others.  The team must submit to the conscientious member’s rules.  Funder’s know that the skills are in the team, and no funder will invest in a lone entrepreneur because this carries too much risk.

The CEO.  For a new venture to grow fast the team should hire a CEO.  Most will do so once the technical issues have been dealt with.  CEO entrepreneurs are a breed apart with personality traits in common with one another; but you can hire them, just as you can hire an accountant. The characteristics of the CEO should not be confused with the characteristics of an entrepreneur.

Doctors are rubbish at wound care

Inspecting her brother-in-law’s hip, she lifted off the wadded dressing to reveal the red, raw, gaping hole 2 cm in diameter where the doctor had removed an abscess. My sister briskly listed the unguents, ointments, and dressing that she would need before declaring that “doctors know nothing about proper wound care”.

My sister does.

My sister works with bed sores and post-operative wounds and all sorts of sticky problem on patients who can’t move around – the elderly and the post operatively incapacitated – sometimes both.  She knows that a lot can go wrong after the first intervention – infection must be controlled, necrotic flesh needs to be dealt with and skin knitting must be encouraged; mobility of the patient must be supported and the overall health of the patient must be stimulated.

A few weeks ago I went to the doctor with a sore toe.  The nail had been half lifted off while out running on New Year’s Day, up hill and down slippery slope and through ankle deep mud, the 10km Resolution Run on the Town Moor. That was more than a month before, and the toe really hurt. (I should wear a sign that says “I have a high pain threshold so if I say it hurts then it really really does”).

The doctor did not look at my big toe and its damage very closely.  On the other foot he examined a little raw spot which had not healed either, and for that he wanted to give me antibiotics, but he could not give me practical advice for The Toe.

So while the raw spot got nicely sorted out with topical anti-biotic,The Toe did not get better – the nail had thickened and become hard and was acting like a hinge, irritating the flesh and skin every time my shoe pushed it. It hurt. I went back for a second appointment and tried to get referred to a chiropodist but I am not in a risk category.  I can’t get cared for by a chiropodist on the NHS.  My doctor could refer me and it was a relief to pay.  To go to someone who knows feet and toes because that is what she has been doing for absolutely years, someone who other people recommend.  She cut and snipped away the dead nail and trimmed and scalpel-ed.  She knows how deep to go.

A week on and the toe was even more painful because what had been happening under the horrible nail was that the skin was cracked and the source of the pain – a deep split – was now visible.  I went back to the chiropodist who assessed the hurt, got me a small iodine and paraffin wax dressing (for the infection and to moisturise the skin and allow wound healing) wrapped the big toe in a toe sleeve, strapped it down with a kidney shaped big toe collar plaster.  By this next morning I was pain free for the first time in 44 days.

Yay for experienced practitioners, yay for hands on experts.

The experienced practitioner (this may be a tautology) knows what needs doing and when it needs doing.

True Grit

On the Newcastle University Campus, the Business School sits on a road that slopes uphill past St James Park.  Walking back from the city centre I passed a group of men and their gritting van spreading grit on the pavements.  I stopped to chat and asked how far up the road they were going and they assured me that they were gritting all the way to the Business School but no further because that is the West End and that is not their area.

I had walked down that hill earlier in the day when I walked from the Medical School, through Leazes Park.  The pavements were a skating rink and I almost fell. I chose to walk in the road rather than end up on my bum.

The pavements in Jesmond have gritting bins and around the schools residents and volunteers had spread grit on the pavements, on the pedestrian bridge over the metro line.

If a group of workers is gritting halfway up the hill couldn’t they also be given the discretion to go all the way up the hill? Alternately give residents access to grit. There would be a reason why a city council would choose to keep grit bins off the street corners but as an ordinary pavement user I struggle to work it out.  There are too many steps between the original decision and my glass ice pavement perspective.

Aesica Pharmaceuticals manufactures pharmaceuticals on behalf of other drug companies; they are contract developers and manufacturers of pharmaceuticals.

So why do they have an Innovation Board?  Don’t they just follow recipes and do as they are told?

The group that now operates as Aesica’s Formulation Development Business Unit was previously R5 Pharmaceuticals.  Paul Titley founded R5 Pharmaceuticals in 2006 to provide formulation development, analytical chemistry and GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) services to the global biotech and pharmaceutical industry. The company was doing very nicely when it was acquired by Aesica in June 2010.

This proves the importance of development to Aesica and shows that contract developers such as them don’t only follow recipes; they also innovate to make manufacturing cheaper.

Cleaner, greener, safer

Cleaner manufacturing is cheaper, greener manufacturing is cheaper; safer is cheaper – as Paul Titley and Barrie Rhodes said to me when we chatted last week. Aesica is on the lookout for inventors and researchers with partly proven good ideas to partner with them. As a company they are able to evaluate the usability, the practicality of such ideas, and they are able to provide a full proving ground.

They are always looking for innovative ideas and it would be great if people came to them with ideas.  But they don’t.

Where do they look for these inventions?

They look at what other people use; other manufacturers and pharma and biotech companies, but not just that.  They don’t expect pharmaceutical innovation to only come from pharmaceutical sources.  For instance at present they are using hot melt methods that arise in a material science department to improve pharmaceutical drug delivery systems.  They can take ideas from food and agriculture – even from science fiction – into pharmaceutics.

Barry and Paul search Open Innovation Forums, trade shows and research.

They don’t know what we are looking for if they attend a conference or a trade show.  What they come back with usually bears no resemblance to what they expected to and the justification given on the forms that are submitted to management.

There are problems in formulation…. where are the solutions?  They are keenly aware of the processes that are in use in the plant and in the challenges, the areas which are expensive.  A small percentage of their annual turnover is a significant number so even small changes, which deliver incremental improvements, are highly sought after.

Open innovation websites and forums are where people list innovations that they are making available outside their own companies and organisations.  These provide a fertile list of innovations that cross link between fields.

Ideas come from all kinds of people.

…. Inventors! Researchers! What else can you do with your research, your good ideas?

A piece of research may be aiming to answer one question, have a specific single outcome.  There is no telling what people outside your field can make of your invention – if they can understand it. Research results which are written with only one audience – the researchers academic peers – in mind can be very dense, impenetrable.  This can be rewritten to be meaningful to those outside the fold.

Someone has an invention; what then? Can you come to someone like Aesica, impress them and expect a wad of cash?

The inventor/researcher has the know-how and a lot of it is tacit knowledge; Aesica sees no point in them just buying it.  The want to share the risk of commercialisation, let it be a partnering.  The researcher / inventor keeps the know-how, and you work together.

Business plan completions like Biotechnology YES! are based on fictitious (though feasible) business ideas.  At Newcastle University(and others; this is a national UK competition) post graduates, PhD students and postdocs make up teams to take part; they are given seminars by practising venture capitalists, business plan specialists, IP lawyers. They can access mentors and are generally coached when they request it, to promote the final product; the business plan.  This plan is then presented at the regional competitions and, if they make it through the first level, the teams get further coaching, attend semi-finals and finals.

If all this effort is put into a business plan for an idea which is fictitious, what exactly is the point?

I have been told that people who progress in the competition, and include this fact on a CV, always get traction from it, that employers value the competition.

Besides the above, I could not see the value myself when I started in my job seven months ago.  But now I do and quite emphatically.  I may see the value in a way that parallels what potential employers do.

Young researchers and scientists are not unique in the fact that they generally do not have experience in business. They are among many groups of people in the general population who do not.  So they should get the training. Of course. But what if they do but the training does not stick?

I remember an early conversation with a young researcher who has been trying to start a company which commercialises his university research.  He said that he wishes that he had more instruction in the “nitty gritty of accounting” because accountants seem out to mystify him and ran rings around him. I had heard these sorts of comments before and it seemed like a fair comment.  If you want people to commercialise stuff then you must give them the tools to do so.  What I discovered after that is that most FMS courses contain some basic accounting teaching. Add to that the fact that each one of them would have had a high level of mathematics to even be admitted to one of their courses and I get the sense that something else is missing.

Embodiment theory indicates that things that we read activates the parts of the brain that relates to how we have experienced those things before. And if I have not experienced them before?  What happens when I meet concepts that are more and more theoretical? For example: I ride a bicycle and I have a full body memory of it; I have never ridden a unicycle but I have seen it up close and watched a real person ride one; I have only seen pictures of penny-farthings. But what are 29ers or boda-boda?  These jargon references to types of bicycles have no resonance with memory in my brain and I would barely remember these words if I walked away from my article now.

This is the problem with bicycle jargon – and business jargon. Exit strategy. Nett profit. Cash flow. Sustainability. The jargon has to be embodied.  The words need to link to concepts and must have been experienced in some way before the words and concepts that they refer to are useable.  A student who has been taught business principles and has no embodied reference to the context for the jargon may as well not have been taught.

A business plan competition is a hothouse, an intense time where jargon is explained, used and then required, for the final presentations.  A business plan competition is a business conversion course for researchers.

* There are other jargon busters that work well.  Best is to go forth and run your own business. A good teacher who utilises case studies, movies and role play breaks through this icy layer as well.

* 29ers are mountain bikes that are built to use 700c or ISO 622 mm wheels. (according to wiki)

* Boda-boda, also known as a Poda-Poda in some parts of Africa, is a bicycle taxi.

What they mean is that they have a need for someone who does what I do.  In any company – actually in life in general – there are moments when one thinks – I wish there was someone whose job it is to do exactly this.  I wish there was a machine that could deliver this precise thing. Where THIS is something that you would love to have done but don’t have the time or inclination to do.

Then I turn up – and it is my job to do it – and they are ever so grateful; but it’s not about me.  It feels so personal, this great big whump of warmth and appreciation, but really? It’s not about me.

On the other hand if life is all about people, and business is all about relationships, then really, it is personal.  In fact we all know that the warmth is pointless and the gratitude will turn to a sour sort of disappointment if I did not take it personally. But not that sort of personally.   How would I define it?

I make it my responsibility to try and promise what I can deliver and no more than that. I try and be aware of what my remit is, and when I stay within my boundaries I can take it as personally as works for me. Because even though I am a worker, I am also a person. Because even though I am a person, I also work.

My son is not deathly ill.  He has a low grade chronic problem that affects his quality of life because it affects his sleep and his appetite.

This morning he reported to the NHS for an allergy test, the skin prick test.

The system when we arrive. He has an appointment so his file is in a pile with other files in a basket that supports, but does not contain, the pile. From previous appointments I know that the file contains labels with his name that can be affixed to samples if needs be.  And other routing information.

Paper files seem cumbersome if I consider the level to which dentists have my records electronically catalogued. But paper files are human shaped, they are physical, they are able to be carried and handed between various levels in the organisation. I can see that the receptionist seems reassured that everything is in place by the fact that the file is there.

We had 12 allergens tested plus a control. Numbered clear tape is pasted on the skin of the forearm and blob-lets of clear to golden liquid are dropped next to an appropriate number. Then (using a clean one each time) a sharp ended metal object is pressed into the drop and through to break the skin below. Tissue paper draped over the top soaks, dabs away the excess and we are sent out to wait for 10 minutes. While his body responded, or didn’t as the case may be.

A raised area like a nettle sting would indicate that an allergic reaction has taken place.  Result? Only the control showed this response, the others were either unaffected or a just a little red.

It’s a little like homeopathy, or the reverse, or being in court because I am the witness. I know that he has sneezing and phlegm-y snorting wheezing asthma episodes and I know (I think I know) they are brought on by the dust in the house and refreshers sweeties and “other stuff”. I know that his asthmatic wheezing coughing needs to be alleviated with an inhaler one or two times a month. But the skin prick tests say he is not allergic to twelve specific things: not to mould and house dust mites and cats and milk and eggs and… …and early trees and late trees and grasses…

So far I have not experienced useful science. This is not a scienctific method because it is not comprehensive.

I would apply a more comprehensive sorting algorithm – one of the first algorithms that I ever had to code – I would want to have mixed reagents. Mix A and Mix B and the reaction to one or the other would guide me to further tests. Is the way that science is used not logical?

A corridor runs from my office – an open plan that holds up to 18 people – in the north east corner of the building all the way to the south east corner, ending at the door to the larger open plan office there.  And in that corridor I encountered a man with a mop and his supervisor who was teaching him.  She was telling him how to clean the tiled corridor floor most effectively and efficiently, “sweep the mop around in a figure of eight…” and encouraging him, “… that’s right…”  And his mop looped back and forth, overlapping, looping and repeating.

If I was making a spy movie… If I wanted to place a team in a corridor for a week, this kind of team would be the ideal cover because everyone just walks past the cleaner.  Even those of us who would usually stop to say hi, will not interrupt a “training session”.

But back to the mop that was looping on the floor in front of the man, the infinity sign which was not a figure of eight.

We can all mop.  My boys mop the floor of the church hall where they attend karate, before the lesson starts.  My husband and a friend mop the floor of the community centre before dancing starts every Wednesday.  They do it without training and I do wonder whether an efficient mopping pattern spontaneously arises or whether it is best taught?

My youngest son has been mopping floors on and off for some years.  There is something about the splashing that he likes.  For a long time I had to repeat the job after he had finished – I called it drying but really it was re-doing.  He resisted any training.  He probably felt that he was doing what he had seen done, that he was doing it correctly and therefore he had no further interest in doing the job any better or best.  He wanted to play with water and mop and bucket and floor.

Back to the trainee in the corridor. He was watched and given the direct line into how to do the job best.  A few days later I saw him receive training on the correct use of a vacuum cleaner for cleaning this long shiny dark grey corridor, which is also used by people attending talks and courses in the large meeting room.

Is training needed?  Does training remove creativity and novelty?  Is there any space left for doing a job that is nourishing to our humanity if all the variability has been trained out like a large hot steam iron?

I am not sure what the answer is because I like a clean floor, and I dislike stickiness underfoot. But surely there is not only one way to achieve a clean floor.  And in the infinite number or correct answer there will be more than one best way.