A Virtual Biotech Firm? What does this mean for employees of the future?

We’ve all heard of Second Life where business can be completely virtual. Here’s a biotech company that produces a tangible product, but the company is mostly virtual, or at least that’s the term used in the article I read; “CoLucid tries to prove that a virtual biotech can produce real returns” in the Triangle Business Journal. Unfortunately you need a subscription to see the complete article, but you don’t need to buy a subscription, you’re getting my comments on the article here for free!

A few quotes from the article:

“Can you build a drug company without bricks and mortar? For a local startup biotech firm, that’s not a hypothetical question.”

“CoLucid has no headquarters and only four full-time workers.”

“But it’s rare to contract out the work of key decision-makers such as the chief medical and financial officers.”

“But being virtual makes CoLucid more nimble, White says, because it can easily change personnel when business changes.”

Chris’ Thoughts:

Outsourcing manufacturing and services such as payroll, engineering, web design, database management, and customer service to another company has been commonplace in the last few decades.

But here is a company that is even outsourcing most of their top management including their chief medical and chief financial officers to contracted employees.

WARNING: I am going off on a tangent to explore the term virtual as it’s used in this context. It’s a term that has certainly evolved over time and keeps morphing in new directions in the last few years. (Please don’t get me started on the current use of the word digital!)

If the companies in Second Life are virtual, than these cannot be, or has the term virtual expanded to cover this use as well.

Based on my myriad experiences in the work world, what we have here is a company with very few regular employees, and a lot of “contracted” employees. The difference here is that they are contracting high-level employees that would normally be regular employees of the business.

The “virtual” in this case is that you don’t have a big building where everyone comes to work with a sign out front and everything. The Internet has opened the possibilities for new business models like this one where a corporate building is not necessary.

And they found that they could outsource the top management positions as well, which seems odd to me since now you have contracted employees, who could have little allegiance to the company except that they want to keep getting a paycheck, making some top-level key decisions for the company.

One thing that I have learned over the years is that contracted employees can be let go a lot faster and easier than regular employees. An early ending to 1,000 contracts is a much different story in the press than laying off 1,000 employees.

It will be interesting to watch and see if a trend emerges.

Is this company really virtual? What’s not these days?

I’m off to the North Carolina CTE Conference next week. I hope to blog here what I learn. If you come to the conference, look for my career data session on Thursday morning.

Well, that’s the way that I see it. Let me know what you are thinking, and stop by again soon for more of my ramblings.