March 29, 2024

Corner Office: Lynn Blodgett: Lynn Blodgett of ACS, on Entrepreneurship in a Big Company

Q. What were some early lessons for you?

A. I come from a family of nine kids — six boys and three girls. Because it was a large family, we didn’t have a lot. One of the things that we did every Christmas was that my parents would say we had to earn our Christmas money. And so they were the venture capitalists.  They’d give us $5, and then we would go buy wholesale wrapping paper and take orders and resell them and turn that $5 into $25.   

It was a great thing, because you learned about customers, learned about keeping your word, getting the orders delivered on time. 

Q. What about your first kind of formal management role? 

A. We worked for my parents, and I did kind of supervisory things there, and then worked for the company that bought my parents’ business and actually ended up running that business.   

Q. What was the company?

A. My parents started a computer business back in the ’60s and grew that into a nice little regional business.  There’s a story behind that. Earlier, my mother worked for the phone company and worked at night, and she had a baby daughter, her seventh child — her name was Nancy. When she was four months old, her heart stopped. And I was 10 years old. I grabbed her and went to my brother, who was 12, and we got her to this clinic and they got her heart started again.  But she had a lot of brain damage from that, so she had to have somebody taking care of her and feeding her all of the time. [She died at 13 from cardiac arrest.]   My mother wanted to work, but she needed to be at home, and so she leased a key punch machine, put it in my sister’s bedroom and started to do data entry, and that’s where many of the principles that we operate on today were formed — how to compensate people, data controls and process control. 

All the kids in our family learned data-entry key punching in my sister’s bedroom, literally at my mom’s knee.  We grew up on a computer farm, as my parents called it, because it was back in the ’60s and it was one of those rare moments when, as key punch machines evolved into computers and our business grew, we were able to associate with these brilliant people from M.I.T. and Harvard . It was a wonderful education. 

Q. You mentioned that you ran your parents’ business after it was sold. How old were you, and how many employees did you have?

A. I was 27, and we had close to 1,000. 

Q. How did you handle that big leap into management?

A. You know, I just used a lot of the stuff we really kind of formulated back in my sister’s bedroom.  We eventually had a key punch machine in each of our bedrooms, so the trick question was, well, how do you pay the kids?  Because if you pay hourly, you’re going to have to have a lot of verification and that kind of thing.  So they came up with an incentive system that was essentially self-policing.  I believe that a really important management principle is that if you get the incentives aligned, people will motivate themselves far better than you’ll ever motivate them. But, again, you have to get the incentives right.   

Q. Just the financial incentives? 

A. It’s not only financial.  It’s being able to feel like they have a level of control over their destiny, that they are valued in what they do, that they’re being successful, that they’re contributing.  Those things are actually probably more important than the money.  But you’ve got to get the money right, too.   

Q. So how did it work in your house with the key punch machines?

A. I was terrible. I’ve never been a good typist. But all my brothers and one of my sisters were exceptional.  So my brothers resented me for getting paid the same as they did even though they did three times as much. Pretty soon my mom and dad both said: “Well, we have to make this more fair. We have to tie it more to what you do.” And because it’s a computer, it can provide all the evidence of the work — productivity and quality — that’s accomplished. 

What happened with that incentive program was that I learned very quickly that that was not for me. I was never going to make any money doing that job. And so this notion of self-nominating is crucial in management. If you can get a person to self-select, that’s a lot better than a supervisor having to come and say “You know, Lynn, you’re just not good.” 

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/business/lynn-blodgett-of-acs-on-entrepreneurship-in-a-big-company.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

More Reports of Avastin Injections Causing Blindness

The latest cases occurred last month at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Los Angeles. Late Thursday, the Department of Veterans Affairs confirmed that the problem had occurred and said that an investigation into the matter was continuing.

“Our deepest sympathy goes out to the veterans affected by the Avastin eye injections,” it said in a statement.

Avastin, made by Genentech, is a cancer drug but is commonly used to treat the wet form of age-related macular degeneration and other eye diseases because it costs only about $50 an injection.

That saves Medicare and patients hundreds of millions of dollars a year compared with using Lucentis, a somewhat similar Genentech drug approved for the treatment of eye diseases but costing about $2,000 an injection.

To use Avastin for eye disease, a vial meant for a cancer patient must be divided into numerous tiny doses and each dose placed in a syringe for injection into the eye. The extra handling increases the risk of bacterial contamination and other problems.

On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration issued an alert saying that 12 patients in the Miami area had suffered eye infections after being injected with Avastin. Some of the patients lost all of the remaining vision in their treated eye, the F.D.A. said.

Earlier this year, four patients at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Nashville also suffered infections from the bacterially contaminated Avastin. The family of one man has filed a claim for $4 million, saying the infection left the man blind and with brain damage.

In the cases in Los Angeles, no contaminant has been identified, according to medical professionals and a patient involved. The five patients, who had macular degeneration, all received their injections of Avastin on Aug. 12 at the V.A. Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center in the San Fernando Valley.

“We all ended up in the E.R. over the course of the next few days and put together the connection,” said the patient in Los Angeles. Most of the patients lost all of their vision in the eye that received the injection, he said.

This man, who said his vision had not recovered, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he and other patients were in talks with the V.A. about the situation.

He said he learned from V.A. officials that the drug had come from the pharmacy at the main campus of the V.A. Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System in Los Angeles.

The recent incidents could lead doctors and patients to use the far more expensive Lucentis instead of Avastin. In its statement, Veterans Affairs said that its Los Angeles medical center had suspended use of Avastin for macular degeneration on Aug. 15 and was now buying Lucentis to resume therapy for the 30 to 40 treatments it administers a week.

Some proponents of the use of Avastin say that there have been more than two million injections of the drug to treat eyes over the last six years with few problems.

The cases are also likely to raise questions about so-called compounding pharmacies, which prepare customized drugs for patients, including doses of Avastin to treat eye problems.

The F.D.A. has limited oversight of these pharmacies.

In its alert on Tuesday, the F.D.A. said the 12 cases of lost vision in Miami had been traced to a single compounding pharmacy, which it did not identify.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=fa81a0cb035ca4a242106a56fe9f0434