Does anybody have a take on Steven Chu, whom President-Elect Barack Obama has nominated as his secretrary for the Department of Energy as a manager? I know he’s a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. I’m curious about how he is as a manager.
Does anybody have a take on Steven Chu, whom President-Elect Barack Obama has nominated as his secretrary for the Department of Energy as a manager? I know he’s a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. I’m curious about how he is as a manager.
I have an online subscription to Platts trade that I browsed earlier and I didn’t see much background there. First, he was director of a national lab in which he was good at getting DOE grants. Second, he was co-chair of an international study group on sustainable energy. Third, at some point this year he was on a panel in which he disputed Robert Rubin’s claim that sustainable, clean energy was simply a matter of political will, pointing out that there is a technicalogical field to traverse as well.
Notice in his meeting with Gore, Obama said: ”I’m looking forward to a busy next couple of years getting our handle — getting our arms around this issue.” My take: Technocrat plus study time plus Clinton EPA people = Obama not wanting to press the progressive agenda on energy and the environment.
What concerns me is the possibility that there’s a pervasive view within the Obama Administration that management is not a craft; that experience doesn’t count.
That is what Sen. Obama ran on, after all.
It’s a virtual guarantee of ineffective management.
As someone with a lot of friends in the sciences, let me tell you that in order to be a success, you have to learn good management skills rather quickly. In academia, a prominent phD like Chu might be managing 20+ grad students and even more undergrads doing many different complex, time consuming experiments at once. It’s similar for those who work in the private sector. Managing scientific experiments requires a great deal of skill in knowing when to be hands on and hands off with the people working for you. Trust me–it comes with the territory.
From the Dec 5, 2008, NYTimes: “Chairman of the physics department at Stanford, and head of the electronics research laboratory at Bell Labs. Since 2004, he has been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has 4,000 employees and a budget of about $650 million.” But no apparant experience with nukes, which is AFAIK most of what DOE does.
I’m less concerned with resume than I am with track record. We’ve got recent experience of dozens of CEO’s who’ve got great resumes and driven their companies into receivership.