Richard Scheller, a biotech leader at Genentech, motivates thousands of employees by tying their work to real patients. At a town hall, a patient with basal-cell carcinoma described how Genentech's hedgehog-inhibitor drug cleared his lesions. Compensation combines market-median salaries with bonuses and stock tied to individual wins like moving molecules into the clinic and company performance.
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The question is how? I'm sort of inward looking and, you know, coming from academia and so on, worked in a lab, sort of with my students and so on. But now I have thousands of people that work for me. How do we motivate? How do someone like me motivate folks? So at Genentech, we actually have a. We work a lot on our culture. We spend a lot of time thinking about our culture. I have a leadership team and we motivate people by the fact that we are doing work that we believe will really, really help patients and sick people. And if you think about. If I think about the kinds of molecules that we have in clinical development for things like Alzheimer's disease, asthma, cancer, infectious disease, psychiatric disorders, if our portfolio plays out reasonably successfully over the next decade, it could actually be the case that we will rather directly affect every family in the developed world. I mean, who doesn't know someone in their family that's had one of those diseases? So we really, really help patients. And that is extremely motivating to me to unblind a clinical trial, especially an oncology clinical trial, where you give half the patients the drug and half the patients the placebo, and the endpoint is how fast they die. I mean, to unblind a clinical trial like that and to see that you've made a difference is really, really, you know, most. I mean, the room usually starts crying. It's just. It's really, really. So the first thing is meaningful work. We believe we do meaningful work and we talk about it. So I had a town hall last week, so all 2,000 people. We had a patient come and talk. The patient was taking a hedgehog inhibitor for a number of diseases, but largely basal cell carcinoma. This guy had a disease called Gorland's disease. It's fairly rare, but it's a basal cell disease again, where you get large growths and if they're not surgically removed, they can be. Mostly they start on your face and then your trunk. He's had it his who can be fist size and he's a salesman. And he said, my whole life I went out doing sales and I had big scars all over. A chunk of his ear is gone. You know, and you know, this is a targeted drug. It's a mutation in the pathway that gives rise to this disease. He takes our drug, all the lesions are gone. He hasn't had one since he started taking the drug. He was so thankful. So, you know, I think that's a big, big motivator for our industry. And it's you know, maybe a little different than other industries. I mean, I'm sure, you know, I love iPhones, but, you know, they don't save my. Probably does save my life, actually. Shouldn't say that. But, you know, it's a little different. So I think that's really, that, you know, that's the number one thing. And then we motivate people through. There's always compensation. So we have three components to our compensation, salary, stock and bonus. And we target salaries at the 50th percentile of the market and we have a target bonus that's at the 50th percentile. But there's tremendous upside depending on the performance of the company and the performance of the individual. Did you move a molecule into the clinic? Did you publish a bunch of great papers? Were you the lead clinical scientist on a phase two study where the design was terrific and it worked, et cetera, et cetera. So bonus and of course stock, which tracks with the overall performance of the company. So I think those would be. I could talk about that for a long time, but I think those would be the two major things it.
