The NRC is sinking

You may be wondering what I am doing here in Germany. The next few posts will describe the events that led up to this year in Bonn. I will try to keep a chipper tone, but some things can't be glossed over. I will get back to posting pictures of quaint things in a few days.

When the announcement was made in the spring of 2009 by the then-President of the NRC Pierre Coulombe that the budget of NRC-CISTI was to be cut by 70% starting in the 2010-11 fiscal year, I held out hope that that this would be more a "right-sizing" than a clumsy bloodletting. At the time, CISTI was largely staffed by aging Boomers who had hung around the place since the late 1970s. Some did great work and were open to new ideas. Others were biding their time and just wanted to keep doing the same routine for a few more years. A handful were blatant slackers who spent all day chatting and smoking on the loading dock. In short, it was a sizeable bureaucracy that I thought would benefit from some fat-trimming. Regardless of what I thought could be done to transform the cumbersome CISTI is another matter. This deep cut was emblematic of the NRC executives' shallow management. Having to find some tens of millions to save they chose to gut an easy target: the library. (Who needs it anyways? It's just a place to store books, right?)

Of course I also made backup plans. The day that the new org-chart was released in October of 2009 (with my name not on it, along with 200 others similarly pink-slipped), I also received a call from H-R that I had won the competition for the position of Business and Planning Officer. Same fantastic salary, different building, and a more high-level approach to the measurement of science. Now I would work at the head office of the NRC, ostensibly using innovation metrics to track the efficiency and performance of the NRC against similar organizations. To use a nautical metaphor, I walked the plank from a sinking ship onto a safe one.

Unfortunately what I found was a ship of fools.

Flitting from meeting to meeting, never having the time to read more than the executive summary of any report (no doubt because it won't fit on the screen of their BlackBerrys), the upper management did not seem to even be aware that there is an entire field of study on how to measure and manage innovation. They were under the gun to cut costs and were hampered by the Balkanized internal culture of the NRC in which each research institute is fiercely independent. Objective metrics of research performance be damned: How much money did we make?

The crazy thing is that we did not know. As the Planning and Business Officer, it was my job to liase with the Finance department and turn their numbers into pretty pie-charts for the bosses. You see, the NRC's Finance department and the vast computerized accounting system they use is designed to keep Treasury Board happy. It is of little use for internal management ("Who's our biggest client in Manitoba?" is almost impossible to answer). In the end, there was only one guy in Finance who knew how to generate accurate figures. Then he stopped answering my emails because the number of such questions from management is infinite.

You know it's time to quit when the daily Dilbert cartoon is an accurate reflection of the day to come.

Less than a year ago Pierre Coulombe was replaced by some guy well past retirement age...from Alberta. While he no doubt has plenty of qualifications, I am sure that Stephen Harper only asked how handy he is with an axe. During my final month at the NRC, 'Paul Bunyan' commanded the executive to develop a new research strategy for the NRC that fit into 6 hot-topic "themes", and to do it all in 3 weeks.

Now by this point I had grown accustomed to being re-assigned to "top priority" projects every couple of weeks because my boss suffered from ADHD. But to see the entire upper management drop everything and launch a frantic series of meetings was something else. Vice-Presidents with careers spanning 30 years pulling all-nighters. Directors-General trying to invent some scheme that would save their institute. Nobody but me seemed to see the absurdity of the task: to select research projects based on how much money they will earn "for Canada" at some point in the future. Besides the vague parameters of the question, the underlying premise that one can predict how much money one will make in industries that do not yet exist based on research that has yet to be done is a feat of divination based on a foundation of guesswork, all performed in the dark.

I began to detect the strong odour of smoke once again coming from the forecastle.

Now...where's that plank?