By TOM MARINER //
Tom’s three rules of employment:
- Hire great people
- Tell them what you do
- Get the hell out of the way
Although an obvious simplification that ignores other management imperatives, these rules are essential – and the polar opposite of how many organizational structures function.
Particularly in the midst of the “Great Resignation,” with 4 million employees quitting per month, a rethink on the attraction and retention of team members is urgent. In fact, attracting, recruiting and retaining key people is the top “pain point” we address at Long Island Bio as we represent our regional bio industries – including pharma, nutra, biotech and medical devices) – in cooperation with our strong regional workforce organizations.
Instead of seeing valued employees quit to sign on with early-stage companies (or form their own startups), wouldn’t we rather reward and honor the contributions they make while moving forward with our existing organizations?
The mass-quitting phenomenon is new, but the benefits of the three rules stretch over Long Island’s long technology history.
Tom Mariner: Eye for talent.
While we were inventing the videogame and microcontroller industries on Long Island, I was asked to guest lecture a Stony Brook University class focused on the marriage of computer chips and software in real time, called “embedded control.” Evidently, my talk about the excitement of the technology we were developing at General Instrument Microelectronics in Hicksville clicked – next I was asked to host a “class project” with three of the program’s brightest students.
My first challenge was how to “teach” these advanced minds. The second was acquainting them with our exciting new technology. All of that was soon overcome by their excitement and talent.
At the time, large mainframe computers were used to program tiny microcontroller computers. The group mentally grasped the idea that I was innovating a “development system” that helped engineers make use of our PIC microcontrollers; I was also working on the mouse for the new Apple Macintosh computer.
Since the previous Apple II computer used BASIC, a language developed by Apple founder Steve Wozniak, they opined they could perform the translation using a desktop computer – a breakthrough!
After they graduated, I hired all three of these smarties. One of their first professional projects was convincing Big Tech players that the video-generating chips and computers from videogames could be cobbled together into a little computer that displayed characters on a television screen.
After plenty of excited ideas thrown around by this crew, we created a demonstration prototype that mated a keyboard and printed circuit boards into a spectacular unit, bringing color words to the screen. I went to Texas to pitch the concept to Radio Shack, the premier electronics retailer at the time, then shipped the prototype to IBM, who we felt might have interest.
Radio Shack decided to go monochrome with their breakthrough TRS-80, and IBM had bigger “personal computer” ideas. But the concepts echoed though many future products.
Looking ahead: Modern medical imaging was jump-started on Long Island, by some truly talented hires.
Fast forward a decade. Our success at morphing Ronkonkoma-based Quantum Medical Imaging from a startup to an industry leader required more technical bandwidth, so once again I called Stony Brook to cherry pick from their best and brightest.
In walked Alex Alves.
I had the idea that a control unit displaying a patient’s previous X-ray images could speed up medical examinations and increase their accuracy. Alves’ suggestion of using Microsoft’s then-new Visual Studio development system led to the TechVision product, which earned rave reviews from the industry and made us a pioneer of what has become a significant medical-imaging tool.
Costs became an issue, and that’s when Tim Caro and Peter Carcaterra waded in. Their talents cut 65 percent out of production costs – they replaced a $400 single-board computer with a faster $35 “hobby” computer board that improved both performance and appearance. They also led us down the path to touchscreen computers.
Medical devices are regulated with written Quality Management Systems, and our crew – which matured along with the industry – always innovated ways of tracking and noting that made the FDA happy, while making us more efficient.
Interestingly, both teams, though decades apart, came from the same professor at Stony Brook University. And importantly, both teams proved – beyond any doubt – the importance of hiring the right people, telling them what you need and then getting the hell out of their way.
Tom Mariner is the executive director of Bayport-based Long Island Bio.
