Domestique

I've written about Team Work in science: after my old boss was awarded a Mentor of the Year Gong. With 10 year hindsight that reads partly like a tale of master and proles; where the Gong-winner may or may not acknowledge that their success is founded on the work of others - not to mention O Fortuna [♩ ♬ ♫ ♪] dealing good cards. But it also gives tribs to those who share, and give and share again. As aside: read the comment which adds another side to an earlier Othering. 

My recent earbook has been Winners by Alastair Campbell which has a niche pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, post-9/11, post-Crash standpoint although Campbell tries hard to tease out eternal verities from the stories of famous politicians, entrepreneurs and sportistas. Campbell was famously ambitious as a journalist, then editor and then Blair's Director of Comms. For his younger self it was all about the winning: putting one over on Losers so he has empathy and understanding for people hewn from the same well 'ard hard stuff. As it happens, and rarely among Britse politicians, he is fluent in German and French and so understands Le Tour de France and its jargon [glossary]. A domestique is one of the riders who puts in the miles solely to ensure that the star of the team gets over the line firstest with the mostest. Don't presume to call such a one "domestique" to their face though: équipier or gregario is more respectful.

In 10 Downing Street in the Blair years there were a number of Effectives, who had risen to the top of their profession about halfway up the Team Blair hierarchy. Offered a promotion, these folks were astute and self-aware enough to refuse: "nope, I know my limits and my comfort zone and I'll leave the stress to you thanks". I know a number of cases of excellent scientists who took the only available path for promotion and finished up as Head of Dept, or even Head of School and perforce left a large part of their scientific chops behind as they took up cudgels in Admin. Science is top-heavy on spectral types: hyperfocus and obsession with detail makes for success. But those attributes often go together with "shy and retiring" and "lack of eye-contact" which makes them kinda useless dealing with boardroom bluster, let alone family crisis or interpersonal tiff from team-members. Promotion? what a waste of talent!

25 years ago I was hired to work in one of the first SFI Science Foundation Ireland multi-million showcase labs to make sense of The Human Genome. I was surprised because I was for sure not the smartest man in the room (nor woman neither!). When SFI hands you money-no-object millions, you can hire the best in the field (who are prepared to migrate to a provincial backwater off the coast of Europe). It transpired that, a few months earlier, I had been talking to my then office-next-door colleague and now boss. I'd given him a candid self-assessment that I was an infrastructural guy whose ambition genes were shot off in the war. At least part of that was true nature but part of it was being brought up as a navy-brat with a strong sense of service. Anyway, my new boss took me at my word and gave me a desk and a laptop and a task to see if human genes were clustered into 'operons': units of related function. I started off robbing code from the Young Turks who were much better programmers than me but then developed a local expertise in displaying data using a particular graphics package. I was happy to have this code robbed by my colleagues when the need arose.

In Campbell's book, there's a neat anecdote about John F "Winner" Kennedy going on a Presidential tour of Cape Canaveral to see how his Giant Step for Mankind project was going. The consummate pol noticed an old black man pushing a broom across an enormous hangar. Although it was kinda obvs, Kennedy asked the elder what he was doing there. "I'm helping to put a man on the moon" was the reply.  Because, dammit, John Glenn and Alan Shepherd and the rest of the NASA team couldn't do their work unless somebody emptied the bins and swept the floor. Quite so!