Genentech CEO Art Levinson likes to have fun and doesn’t preserve his sense of humor even when discussing serious questions of serious business.
Several years ago, Levinson prompted Genentech top managers to play a trick on incoming research chief Richard Scheller who had left a tenured professorship at Stanford University to join Genentech. Levinson asked his associates to pretend Genentech was actually going down the drain. At Scheller's first management meeting, executives presented fake slides, showing the company is in trouble and seems to have poor prospects. To accentuate the effect Levinson lamented that the board would surely fire him. "They really had me," Scheller remembers.
Richard Scheller got back at the CEO in concordance with Genentech’s corporate culture welcoming joy and non-hierarchy. He placed a 6-foot-tall cutout of Levinson dressed as Star Trek's Spock at the door of an off-site meeting and distributing hundreds of smaller copies to executives.
Background links:
Robert Levering, Milton Moskowitz, What It Takes To Be #1, The Great Place to Work Institute, 2006
Genentech's Medicine Man, BusinessWeek, October, 6, 2003
