What business school taught me about running a research lab

From ScienceMag:

When I enrolled in an MBA in 2020, my colleagues were puzzled. The COVID-19 pandemic had just struck, and my group’s work designing ways to provide virtual medical care had suddenly become extremely relevant. I was getting grants, and my team had rapidly increased in size. So why was I choosing now to study business, my colleagues asked—was I leaving academia? But I wasn’t trying to escape. I wanted to learn how to lead.

I had launched my research group a year earlier, believing my dual training as a physician and engineer had prepared me for anything. I could diagnose disease, design medical devices, and translate ideas between clinicians and coders.

But within months, I realized there was one language I didn’t speak: management. Budgeting was challenging, meetings ran long, and communication between members of my lab, who came from a range of disciplines, was often messy. Our progress felt slower than it should have been. I had built a lab full of talent, but not yet a structure that could harness it.

The MBA felt like stepping into another world. In medicine and engineering, problems are solved by data and precision; in business, they’re solved by people and culture. Early on, one of my business professors said something that has stayed with me: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I’d heard it before, but sitting among entrepreneurs rather than scientists, it finally clicked. A research strategy means little if your team members don’t trust one another, communicate openly, or share a sense of purpose.

When I returned to the lab after each MBA module, I began to apply what I was learning in an attempt to reshape that culture. I started by opening up our channels of communication. Previously, I had run siloed meetings with different specialists, thinking medical experts wouldn’t care about the intricacies of our engineering projects, for instance. But I realized there was merit in having everyone together, so all team members could see how their work fit into the larger vision.

I also built what I now call “waterfall mentorship,” to ensure support flowed more freely. Before the MBA I was the sole mentor for everyone, which created a bottleneck. Junior researchers would wait days for my feedback and midlevel team members had no formal role in coaching others. Under the new system, each team member helped mentor those below them, down to the most junior researcher, who mentored their peers.

Finally, we began to treat our projects more like commercial startups. Previously, I’d approached them like traditional academic research: Define a hypothesis, secure funding, execute the plan, publish the results. But this often meant we could spend months building something only to discover, too late, that clinicians found it impractical or patients found it confusing. The MBA taught me that successful innovations are built around clear customer needs. We began to enlist our “customers”—doctors and patients—early on, testing our technology with them and adjusting it based on their responses.

Many in my group were initially skeptical of the changes. There was a lot of eye rolling. But the benefits quickly became clear. People spoke up sooner when something wasn’t working. Breakthroughs happened thanks to the fresh perspective nonspecialists could offer. Lab members felt a stronger sense of shared ownership and responsibility for each other’s growth. And we ended up building technology people actually wanted to use, not just something that looked good in a grant proposal.

Not everything translated perfectly from business school to academia, of course. Unlike a business, we’re not focused on making a profit. But what I took from the MBA wasn’t a corporate playbook—it was a mindset. It taught me to view the lab as a dynamic organization whose success depends as much on trust, motivation, and leadership as on technical expertise.

After I finished my MBA, a faculty colleague followed suit—and now one of my postdocs has also enrolled. Not everyone has the time, money, or inclination to do a full program. But there are plenty of opportunities for scientists to become better leaders, from microcredentials to courses run by grant agencies. It is unrealistic to expect new principal investigators to instantly know how to run a lab. I certainly didn’t. But with deliberate effort, we all have the capacity to improve.

Read More