Richard Scheller: Choose Your Words Carefully

One of the things that I did there was someone said to me, you know, you should meet the head of HR. And I said, what does that stand for? Honestly, I had no idea what that stood for. They said human resources. I said, oh, human resources. So that kind of sounded to me like they must hire the people. So then someone explained to me what HR is and they do all sorts of things and so on, so I learned. But one of the things that the executive committee of Genentech at the time decided to do was to collect 360 feedback from our peers and folks that work for us and sort of tell us how we're doing. So this was really a novel experience for me. So I was— my first 360 feedback, let me see if I can remember, they said I was aloof, "arrogant and dismissive." You know, and I said, "Of course I am. You know, how do you think I survived as a scientist?" You know, it was a competitive, you know, arena. But they said, "Well, you know, BS, but it's probably not going to work here. So what we'd like you to do is then to go discuss your 360 feedback with your reports and one level down, your directors. So I said, "Oh, wow. Okay, we'll go do that." So I went into the room with these people and I knew that it's mostly these people that said that I was those things, which I didn't know anyone specifically who said it. Of course, it was anonymous. But I said, "Well, gee, you know, you say— people say I'm aloof, dismissive, and arrogant and I can't—" I can't understand this. I mean, my parents said that, my wife says that, my colleagues at Stanford say that, you know, you say that. I cannot figure out how you are all wrong in the same way. So basically found that you need to be a much better listener. You need to really, really respect folks and their opinions. But it is very— it is different in industry compared to being here. I think part of the reason that people found me quite brash was the fact that here when I said something, nobody actually did what I said. Or, you know, they hopefully they at least marginally considered it, but then they would go No, really. I mean, postdocs, students, I mean, they could do really what they wanted to do, which was fine. So I took that attitude to Genentech and actually found very quickly that while I didn't really want the atmosphere of the company to be that way, that it is just different and it is somewhat more hierarchical and that people actually do what you say. So you have to be really careful with what you say because folks take it incredibly seriously.