Managing Science: Management for R&D Laboratories

Collectively, Claude Gelès, Gilles Lindecker, Mel Month, and Christian Roche have many decades of involvement in managing accelerator laboratories, primarily at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) and at Brookhaven National Laboratory. They note in an informative preface to Managing Science: Management for R&D Laboratories that "scientists tend not to respect management as a scholarly field on a par with the hard sciences--or with sociology or economics for that matter." These authors, however, obviously do respect management as a scholarly field; they have developed and taught university courses on the management of scientific laboratories. Now they offer their insights in a book that covers nearly every topic of value in the management of nonprofit research facilities and organizations.

The emphasis here is on facilities and organizations. This is not a book about the art of managing individual scientists. It is a book for committed professional managers of scientific research organizations or students and scientists who want to become such.

The performance of an industrial organization is ultimately measured in terms of rate of return on investment. No such simple measure exists for a nonprofit organization. The most important product of a scientific laboratory is increased knowledge, but how can one compare the output of knowledge to the input of funds? Faced with this quandary, the authors adopt a pragmatic approach, repeatedly emphasizing the difficulty of accurately assessing organizational performance but providing useful guidelines and best practices for improving it.

The book is divided into a major and a minor section. Part 1, The Management Structures, covers topics such as why nonprofit research organizations exist and how they are created, developed, organized, and operated. I enjoyed the discussions of decision-making systems and organizational communications. The historical series of organizational charts from CERN and DESY (the German electron-synchrotron laboratory) is one of many delightful appendices. It shows a tendency of organizations to fluctuate between predominantly "line" and more "matrixed" structures. The ideal line and the ideal matrix never appear, but seemingly, each newly appointed director-general tries for the traditional line hierarchy and then moves toward a matrix (because accumulated experience generates wisdom?). Another appendix analyzes the reasons for the demise of the Superconducting Super Collider. The authors adopt an unnecessarily tentative tone for their conclusion that all involved parties were part of the failure. Isn't it usually that way?

The material on project management, human resources, and financial management is standard fare and is treated in greater depth in the extensive literature on project management. I skimmed very quickly through the material on logistics, general services, and supply chain as I raced to get to the intriguingly titled Part II, The Human Drama. This is a smaller grouping of chapters, each mirroring a topic already covered to some extent in Part I but focusing on the human, or psychosocial, dimensions of that topic. Here I found some of the writing a bit murky.

The authors stress the subjectivity of so much of human knowledge, which leads individuals to make decisions that sometimes produce organizational failure. Terms such as "destructive coherence" and "decoherence" are used to describe such organizational states, with no serious attempt to define these words in context. Finally, some of the passages read all too clearly as transcriptions of classroom lectures, in which the distinguished professor seeks to distill some life wisdom for his students. It actually comes across as sound advice now that I'm 50 years old, but I don't recall having much capacity to appreciate this sort of advice when I was in my twenties.

Nevertheless, the patient reader is rewarded by an epilogue that clarifies and summarizes the authors views on organizational stagnation and failure. Four rules are given for effecting renewal from within the organization. My favorite is Rule 4, "Always remember, be pragmatic."