Todd B. Slaby
helping companies and investors differentiate themselves by turning IDEAs into PRODUCTs & PLATFORMS
I’m a generic Ph.D.-trained scientist, Industry synthetic biologist, a former soccer player, a casual curler, a horrible golfer, and an operational efficiency specialist inside of and outside of the laboratory. While growing up, dinners in my house were held amidst conversation about efforts to improve worker safety, to enhance manufacturing productivity, and to decrease corporate risk. As an adult, I now realize how much I’ve internalized these Kanban, Agile, Hoshin, Six Sigma, and Total Quality concepts with which I grew up.
I’ve done most of my learning in industry. Graduate school was a fascinating place to learn that I don’t do work; I build systems. As an industry scientist, I have repeatedly taken ideas or “high-level requirements” and turn them into “well-oiled machines” with processes, systems, and teams.
When I realized I enjoyed helping companies and its employees improve with my Total Quality mindset more than I enjoyed helping as a laboratory scientist, I began consulting across a wide-range of industries — but with a particular focus on biology- and health-related start-ups. More than twenty years of academic and industry R&D exposed me to almost every class of organism, as well as how different leading companies organize themselves. One similarity is that they all — at one point or another — needed help from beyond their walls.
No company can survive as an island unto itself. Failures at the team-, division-, or corporate-level are failures of systems that are isolated. People take the blame usually, but people tend to only behave in ways tolerated by the system around them.
What distinguishes me from others is my track record straddling disparate disciplines needed for successful Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical, and Healthcare R&D:
Software Development Life Cycle
Operations Workflows
Business Systems
Project Management
Product Management
Platform Development
Team-building
Discovery (Research)
Scientific Strategy
Manufacturing