Albuquerque, NM
May 14 -16, 1997

Consortial Leadership: Cooperation in a Competitive Environment

Thomas Garcia, Director for Institutional Development
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to be here today. I’m not surprised to hear that America’s research libraries are contending with the same winds of change that we at Los Alamos face. And the theme of your gathering—Cooperating in a Competitive Environment—shows you’ve come to just about the same conclusions as we have up at the lab.

It’s also especially fitting that you gather here in Albuquerque. A truly western city. Because the challenge—and the myths—of the American West have shaped so many elements of our national culture, and how we all do our work.

One personification of the myth, embellished by Hollywood, is of the Lone Ranger, the solitary gunman riding into town to clean things up. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood didn’t become cultural icons by portraying consortial leaders. They played isolated individuals who kept their mouths shut, let the others make fools of themselves with words, and then when action was demanded, gave it—usually from a gun barrel.

Today, as we talk about the very different kinds of challenges in a world that now seems the size of a PC terminal, I want us to keep the Lone Ranger in mind. Because, politically incorrect as he was, he symbolized individual creativity. Let’s not forget him altogether.

Now Los Alamos in its corporate style is a hybrid of two influences. First it is very much a government culture. An while it might seem a stretch to compare Uncle Sam to the Lone Ranger—maybe it isn’t. Culturally, your federal government isn’t used to partnering. It’s used to being in charge, and trusting no one. Just look at the IRS, or federal procurement practices, the whole mentality of enforcement. The assumption there is that everyone outside the government is potentially a crook, and so government/non-government agreements must be constructed accordingly. This just doesn’t encourage partnerships.

The other cultural influence at Los Alamos is traditional university administration. For, remember, most of the employees up on the mesa are employees of the University of California, which has the administrative contract to run the lab for the Department of Energy. Of our headcount, about 7,000 are UC employees and only about 70 are Energy Department employees. And while you don’t think of universities as home to lone rangers, either—in fact, they might be. Just think of faculty competing against one another for tenure, guarding research funds, promoting pet projects, departments competing against one another. I'm reminded of the adage about universities, “Never was such treachery undertaken for stakes that were so small.”

But much as we in Los Alamos may yearn to be free and riding the range, to survive, we now have to get along. An armchair philosopher told me about ten years ago that our era would be marked by things running together. Distinct movements, ideas, and causes would begin to overlap and lose their definition. For example: the last major communist dictatorship in the world utters not a peep about the evils of capital; the Chinese communist market economy roars along setting growth records; while nominally democratic Russian economy looks a lot like Chicago gangland. And the so-called western capitalist powers, particularly in Europe, seem stagnant and hamstrung—they deal with the earthquake of change like the old Kremlin once did: by denial.

I represent an institution that’s still learning, first-hand, the lessons of change. How so? First, our big bad foreign enemy deflated like a hot air balloon almost overnight. And in its place, we face dozens of national adversaries—whether rogue states or rampant viruses, groundwater pollution or disintegrating nuclear stockpiles—that demand more than a nuclear blunderbuss. Second, our great big government patron isn’t a growth industry anymore. Whereas in Dwight Eisenhower’s day half of your tax dollar went for defense, only 16 cents is going for defense under Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. In fiscal year 1997, we’re spending the lowest amount of the U.S. Gross National Product for defense since 1939.

And yet our mission at Los Alamos hasn’t gotten smaller. If anything, it has grown. Our core mission has become “To help reduce the global nuclear danger.” This includes:

• stewardship of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, but without nuclear testing and no new designs;
  
• guarding against nuclear proliferation and other weapons of mass destruction; and
  
• dealing with the nuclear legacy of half a century of weapons production, including environmental considerations.

So it’s clear that despite the fall of the evil empire, our workload at Los Alamos hasn’t gone down. Testing weapons without being able to actually detonate them is a real challenge. The other assignments push us to the limit. Yet our federal budget share is now competing with everything from the peace mission in Bosnia to workfare block grants.

The defense share of our budget is holding at about $750 million, down from $1.1 billion in the Reagan administration. Yet, rather than shrivel away or stagnate with the Feds, we’ve committed ourselves to staying at the billion-plus level. We’re making up the difference through cost-savings and new partnerships with industry and universities, collaborating with our home communities and with the other research labs. Just as you’re learning to partner in a time of growing workload an uncertain dollars, so are we.

Specifically, we have to stay at the forefront of science, and we have to use state-of-the-art technology. And Los Alamos’ years of partnering tell me that to do world-class science, we must partner with universities. And to do state-of-the-art technology, we must partner with industry.

In other words, we aren’t joining consortia just to be good citizens. It’s in our enlightened self-interest. Now let’s look at how we’ve done this.

As for partnering with academe, we’ve always done it, but our links to universities are more important than ever now. And while we need universities, they also need us. This is especially true in the area of high-performance computing.

On the human level, we bring over 1,000 faculty members and 350 postdocs to Los Alamos every year. In addition, we host 1,400 students every summer. These visitors and other university programs break out into three areas:

• individual research collaborations;
  
• research teams; and
  
• user research facilities.

As for industry partnerships, we know that private industry performs over 70 percent of all the research and development in the U.S. We need to stay abreast of that and leverage it for our own uses whenever possible. It’s in the interest of taxpayers, shareholders, and the quality of the work we all do. Areas where collaboration is especially fruitful include:

• modeling, simulation, and high-performance computing;
  
• smart sensors;
  
• advance, tailored materials;
  
• advance, agile manufacturing techniques;
  
• lifetime prediction and lifetime extension of components;
  
• handling and analysis of huge amounts of data; and
  
• cryptography.

Computer partnerships are at the heart of our cooperation with industry. Our Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative—ASCI—is a fancy name for the supercomputing necessary to simulate nuclear tests. Cray is in the process of providing us with the world’s most powerful computer, capable of doing three trillion calculations per second, or three teraflops, in computer lingo.

This will put us in direct competition with our sister labs, Sandia in Albuquerque, and Lawrence Livermore in California. Our goal is to be able to do tens of teraflops after the turn of the century. But to get this done, we’re partnering with industry, because machines like the Cray we’re buying have such tiny markets that without our help, they might not even be produced.

Yet, once in place, these high-end computers, combined with our lab’s modeling and simulation capabilities, will be very attractive to different industries for contract use.

But supercomputing isn’t the end of it. As of early this year, we’d signed more than 200 cooperative research and development agreements—or “cradas”—with private companies. These agreements are meant to be two-way streets: private companies win access to our brains and equipment, and we’re put in touch with private sector breakthroughs. Under these agreements we provide for operating cost of the particular project, while the private partner provides staff, equipment, and concepts. We estimate it could be worth many millions of dollars a year, while the running costs are only about 5% of our budget.

Under the “cradas” we’re doing things like plasma accelerator work, counterfeit currency detectors, and even a look at how our skills might be applicable to Walt Disney animators. We intend for this to generate from between $25-50 million per year within five years.

Another area where we’ve partnered is with our home county, Energy Department leaders, and private firms to develop an industrial park for Los Alamos County. The first step is a 50,000 square-foot building to house research and development companies, and it looks like Motorola will be our first anchor tenant.

Our partnerships are also taking the form of spin-offs. We’ve spun off certain skills into Norsam Technologies, which is using them to create new business in northern New Mexico. Our goal is to create ten spin-offs each year for five years.

In addition, we’ve partnered anew with our own employees. The old days of the university-modeled administration have given way to a completely redesigned management structure built to meet our new needs and mission. Our staff was intimately involved in shaping this new structure. Many of them took part in study groups to redefine our culture. Throughout the process we polled everybody several times to see if our perceptions were squaring with theirs. When they weren’t, we in management went to work to narrow the gap.

And of course we’re partnering with other government agencies, universities, and business on research in such non-defense areas as groundwater, pollution, global climate change, ozone layer depletion, and genetic research. We’re using our supercomputers to map human DNA, and we’re helping fight AIDS.

But I save the biggest consortium for last, and this is one where you research librarians could find common cause. This year 350 labs, universities, and private companies formed the Coalition for Research and Development. This Coalition was spawned by our concern over the declining federal dollars for basic science research and development—or “R&D” as we call it. While the economic power of this country was built on R&D begun 50 years ago, a number of factors are blurring that reality.

Our Coalition came together out of fear that Americans have been asked to pay for so much that, now, when a more complex threat is surfacing, audiences may turn away.

But the latest threat is upon us: the one I’ll call the “war for the future.” The war for the future will be won by those nations who appreciate the importance of basic scientific research and development and make the proper investments. I believe that the cause of R&D is something that touches each and every one of us, from the ease and speed with which we live and move, to how we learn, how much we earn, whether we have jobs at all—indeed, to whether we have medicines and treatments to stay alive.

To put it more directly: an influential group of economists called the “New Growth Theorists” estimate that 50% of American economic growth since the 1950s has been due to the nation’s investment in scientific R&D.

Yet, if you read the budget numbers today, America is entering the twilight of its federal R&D spending. Federal money for basic R&D, like Washington money for just about everything, is expected to decline in the coming years, as much as 25% in the next five years, certain projects will be impacted in a fatal way, while others may be able, over time, to find at least partial support elsewhere.

But there are a whole new generation of other countries, of leaders and researchers who covet our leadership role, and who’ve declared that they will do whatever necessary to beat us out. Many of them have studies here; some have taught and worked and even administered our universities and research facilities. I speak in particular of the Asian tigers: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand. Others may soon follow: China, Malaysia, India, and Indonesia.

Japan recently announced that it would begin increasing its government R&D spending by 7-10% a year, to $150 billion. This is in a country that already spends 2.8% of its GNP on civilian R&D. And it doesn’t include Japanese private industry’s figures.

The United States is now spending about 2.5% of its GNP for both defense and civilian R&D, divided between federal funds at about &72 billion, and another $100 billion from the private sector. The federal spending cuts will bring the total down to about 2.2% of GNP, but, as always, a large share of the U.S. federal spending will still go towards defense-related programs. Japan’s huge R&D expenditures are almost totally devoted to civilian research, as in the other Asian tiger economies.

Enough about the “war for the future.” But before I conclude, I should tell you about a very new partnership tool at our own research library that should sound familiar to you. We call it our “library without walls.” We’ve given it top priority, to help us ride the earthquake of change.

Just as the Berlin Wall was torn down by change, the old concept of the library full of books in an expensive building has also gone with the wind. Up at Los Alamos, as at your libraries, the term “research library” really means providing information access—whether to the local collection or at a database in Moscow.

Our library without walls provides 24-hour access to our digital library resources from anywhere our customers can connect to the network. Our long-term goal is the “Creation of a network of knowledge systems which facilitate collaboration between people.” What better tool for cooperation in an competitive environment, of for consortial leadership?

One key element of our library without walls is “SciSearch”—access to the literature produced by the institute for scientific information. The SciSearch database of over 13 million citations is available from 1977 through to the present. We also have a weekly alerting service to track favorite journals or subjects.

Another library innovation is our new offering of over 10,000 unclassified Los Alamos technical reports, going back to the year 1943. This can be accessed from our research library’s online catalogue and from our unclassified publications database. The database is updated twice a month, and now holds nearly 55,000 references.

Finally, our library without walls is working with publishers, like Academic Press, The Institute of Physics, The American Physical Society, The American Mathematical Society, and elsewhere to provide full-text, full-image electronic journals. We now have several hundred available.

Needless to say, our tremendous progress in library science, technology, and administration is not automatic. Rather, it is the result of people, and one person in particular: Rich Luce, Los Alamos National Laboratories Librarian. Rich is a model manager in our institution. An individual who excels as a result of his mastery of continuous quality improvement tools and methods.

I’m sure that the virtual revolution and information technology are having just as much impact on what you do as the end of the cold war and budget cuts are having on us. But the lesson for both our professions is that strength will come from collaboration.

I opened with the image of the Lone Ranger. I told you how my team of lone rangers up at Los Alamos have turned in their six-guns and joined a support group, so to speak. The size of our mission, and the size of our organization, dictated we do it. You’ve probably come to the same conclusions. Because the lone ranger approach is very high-risk. When you win, all the rewards flow to you alone. But when you lose, you lose everything. Just look at Humphrey Bogart in “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

The visionaries and the lone rangers will still find their place in this newly-wired world. Our more conventional organizations must struggle to give them a home when we can, because we need creativity and innovation as much as anybody. For, while we partner and collaborate, we will also find ourselves competing harder—even against ourselves. In the newly competitive world of R&D, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia compete against one another now. It’s healthy; it stimulate innovation and saves money.

In closing, I’d like to quote from the Bible. Ecclesiastes says, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven... a time to break down, and a time to build up.” But in our era, the breaking down and the building up are coming simultaneously, and at light speed. Earthquakes are shaking the ground we walk on.

A few verses later, Ecclesiastes warns, “Woe to him that is alone when he falleth.” I think the message from Ecclesiastes is clear. Now is a time to join hands and walk together. Walking together, we each have a better chance of making it through the revolution—the earthquake of change—that now looks like it will outlive all of us.

Thank you.

Copyright � 1998 by Thomas Garcia