If you hang around enough scientists and engineers who are deep into their respective fields and have advanced degrees, you might quickly realize that we are all quite diverse.
Even then, I think you need to continually sell and verify that your initial case is/was right as the project progresses too. I think a 3 to 6-month cadence is good here where you get technical, commercial, and operations, and maybe even some regulatory feedback on if where you are headed is even feasible. If you need a new tank/pump/motor for anything in the plant this might be $250k+ CAPEX with a 1 to 2-years of lead time, potentially a PMN with the EPA, or a BOM wherein the costs are just too high. You should be comfortable in letting go of technical approaches that won't work and trying again, but this can add a lot of time to the project.
Doing it sounds easy, but when your commercial team has already promised X EBITDA by a certain date it's almost impossible to alter course or you need to constantly readjust expectations.
OR you can just sandbag everything and/or work in secret with your customers as the R&D team until you get great results and potential demand volumes with potential pricing and positive margin data and THEN let your commercial team know what you are doing, but that's a bit shady. Not saying I've never done that with good results, but definitely an approach you can only take when people actually like you including your customers.
I couldn’t imagine. I’ve been tech director for a couple years and success has come from a lot of doorway conversations at people’s offices.
It’s a nebulous job but “Technical Director” to me has been a wrangler of people, motivations, and technology - an extracellular membrane in the multi-cellular organism that is a company. Communicating technical reasons for why things have to go a certain way to non-tech folk and vice versa. If not, you’re just a more senior ‘senior scientist’.
Taking out the physical presence component really makes you less persuasive.
Also makes it hard that many upper managements expect everyone buy-in because it’s their job. You can’t lead with “we’re going to have to convince A, B, and C to do X, Y, and Z” in response to a new business directive. But it’s what you’ll have to do whether upper mgmt knows it or not.
And you can force/coerce on short term but that’s not going to build anything that will last.
100%. Also, if they like you as a person, you're more likely to make the cut when times get tough. I also like your anecdote on expediting SDS submissions. All you had to do was reach out to the overworked person responsible for this task and work out the best path forward in a bad situation. This is an approach all of us could use.
It's shocking how much can be resolved internally when you just get on the phone with people and talk stuff out and figure out where they are coming from and then raise up actual issues to management teams.
In todays world, sometimes the hardest sales I’m making are selling the internal team to get work done like you’ve just described.
Either motivating R&D to come up with cool solutions to problems, getting operations happy with volumes, or solving a business process for a customer.
Sure the good old days of “managing” workers is okay but in todays world if you are like-able than you’ll get so much further.
Even then, I think you need to continually sell and verify that your initial case is/was right as the project progresses too. I think a 3 to 6-month cadence is good here where you get technical, commercial, and operations, and maybe even some regulatory feedback on if where you are headed is even feasible. If you need a new tank/pump/motor for anything in the plant this might be $250k+ CAPEX with a 1 to 2-years of lead time, potentially a PMN with the EPA, or a BOM wherein the costs are just too high. You should be comfortable in letting go of technical approaches that won't work and trying again, but this can add a lot of time to the project.
Doing it sounds easy, but when your commercial team has already promised X EBITDA by a certain date it's almost impossible to alter course or you need to constantly readjust expectations.
OR you can just sandbag everything and/or work in secret with your customers as the R&D team until you get great results and potential demand volumes with potential pricing and positive margin data and THEN let your commercial team know what you are doing, but that's a bit shady. Not saying I've never done that with good results, but definitely an approach you can only take when people actually like you including your customers.
Gathering buy-in from the internal team is key and is not automatic.
Even more difficult if you are operating in a global team versus regional.
I couldn’t imagine. I’ve been tech director for a couple years and success has come from a lot of doorway conversations at people’s offices.
It’s a nebulous job but “Technical Director” to me has been a wrangler of people, motivations, and technology - an extracellular membrane in the multi-cellular organism that is a company. Communicating technical reasons for why things have to go a certain way to non-tech folk and vice versa. If not, you’re just a more senior ‘senior scientist’.
Taking out the physical presence component really makes you less persuasive.
Also makes it hard that many upper managements expect everyone buy-in because it’s their job. You can’t lead with “we’re going to have to convince A, B, and C to do X, Y, and Z” in response to a new business directive. But it’s what you’ll have to do whether upper mgmt knows it or not.
And you can force/coerce on short term but that’s not going to build anything that will last.
100%. Also, if they like you as a person, you're more likely to make the cut when times get tough. I also like your anecdote on expediting SDS submissions. All you had to do was reach out to the overworked person responsible for this task and work out the best path forward in a bad situation. This is an approach all of us could use.
It's shocking how much can be resolved internally when you just get on the phone with people and talk stuff out and figure out where they are coming from and then raise up actual issues to management teams.