本文中Electronic News和Electronic Business与的CEO Bill Sullivan讨论了公司当前的重点、最近的分拆以及科学世界多门学科的融合。以下是摘要：
Q: 促使Agilent公司剥离半导体和半导体业务的内因是什么，目前公司发展如何？
Sullivan: 2005年8月我们决定将公司重心完全放在400亿的测试市场。除此之外，我们相信与测试行业相关的附加机会也会有几十个亿。
Q: 所以这也就变成了你们唯一的核心竞争力？
Sullivan: 是的。这是HP公司的基石，也因此我们回到了我们做的最好的领域。做出剥离半导体相关生意的决定是因为半导体有着不同的商业模型，它的市场更加多变。如果回望过去十年，核心测试生意的增长速度是高于半导体生意的，而且它的波动性只有公司波动的三分之一。我们成立了Avago，它是一家很有竞争力的半导体公司，Verigy是一家很有竞争力的半导体测试公司。
Q: 从研究的角度看，这些剥离有效果了吗？
Sullivan: 作为一个专一的组织这很难说。我们的核心竞争力一直是测试技术，半导体超出 了HP的需求。目前，我们前行的方向是全心投入测试技术。我们重组了中央研究实验室，侧重于电子测量，测量以及诸如纳米技术领域和家庭安全等新的测试技术。
Q: 很多新的技术发展都用埃（Angstroms）为测试单位了，这会增加研发成本吗？
Sullivan: 我们将总开支的12%用于研发。除了在日本、美国以及欧洲外我们还将研发扩展到东南亚、中国和印度。很明显，这是个需要在前沿投入研发的行业。
Q: 但是在科技的前沿有很多未知因素，你怎么为研发投入选择正确的方向呢？
Sullivan: 中央实验室的一个重要作用是观察不同市场的大趋势并且预见且随同这些趋势前进。我们需要考虑的就是使得科学家创新并商业化的最佳测量技术。在Agilent实验室有一组人与商业、产业界以及学术界通力合作来找到这些需求，也就是说通过与顶级的高校和政府研究合作来为Agilent做出最佳的选择。
Q: 对于可测的和不可测的都有那些障碍呢？
Sullivan: 我们是否面临不可跨越的障碍呢，我想没有。就说生命科学，我们仅仅开始理解细胞生物。有人讲到分子计算。我的观点是我们有很多的选择。Agilent实验室刚刚推出了对微RNA的测试，它是五年前才发明的。
Q: 有多少生意是来自生命科学呢？
Sullivan:基本上，去年公司70%来自于电子测量，30%是生命科学和化学分析。但是，生命科学和化学分析生意是增长最快的。我们排名第一的投资和机会增加就在生命科学领域。当你想到测量，通常倾向于观察物理世界，测量光子、电子或者分子，我们的任务是将它转换到数字领域，通过数字化使得工程师、科学家和研究者有一个不同的洞察。所以我们有70%的工程师是软件工程师。
Q: 这个不是建模吗？
Sullivan: 建模往往对已有规范起作用，比如测试一个雷达系统或者对一个无线城市进行仿真建模。如何让大家看到在以往模型中无法恒定观察的数据呢？这就需要建立新的模型，但是这必须通过旧模型的理念并且直观化这些数据才可以实现。这就是生命科学令人激动的地方。它目前还处于初级阶段，是一个有很多相关的学科。
Q: 你认为Agilent在未来扮演一个不同角色吗？它架起了电子学、光谱学和海量数据研究的桥梁。
Sullivan: 这是Agilent的赌注，看我们能否将公司的财务能力与科技的广度完美结合，使得我们在400亿的测试市场鹤立鸡群。
Q: 目前在电子领域我们主要集中在原子级，开始考虑亚原子级了吗？
Sullivan: 我们内部对此有争论。它最大的可能用处在于对细胞生物更深的理解以及细胞内部繁杂的构造为何会导致生病。我们的机会在于测试、可视化并对之建模，使人们可以继续前进。
Q: 这会涉及到多门学科，你是如何组建和训练这些多功能的队伍？
Sullivan: 这取决与团队的领导，他必须要建立一个共同的中心并集合不同输入使之运转。看待一个问题有不同的方式，所以我们以人为本。同时我们与一些物理学家在组织间进行交互，以此来推动我们的理念。
Q: 对待一个问题不同学科间有那些不同呢？
Sullivan: 简单的说，物理世界可以通过明确的公式去预见，所以物理学家倾向于找寻基于方程的方案。而生物界很复杂难解，所以生物学家倾向于找寻关联。
Q: 在做这些测试时，你是否在寻找模式的畸变？
Sullivan:有些时候畸变并不导致疾病。检查100个人，你会发现有14个人的染色体有问题会导致癌症，但是实际上只有一半的人会得癌。为什么会这样呢？
Q: 让我们回到多学科的团队上。这些团队的领导者有那些特质呢？
Sullivan: 的领导模型很简单。我们希望团队的领导者对我们前进的方向以及实现途径等战略意图有清晰的认识。二是可以通过团队组织的力量去实现目标。这些领导者需要有很强的能力去取得信任，然后他们就要去吸引最优秀的人才，并领导他们实现目标。
Q: 你在哪里找到这些人才呢？
Sullivan: 今年我们要雇佣2000人。我们加强在高校的人才吸引，同时也在业界挖掘人才。
Q: 在研发中有那些国家也开始发挥作用了呢？
Sullivan: 我认为中国和印度的闪现是对世界经济的最大冲击。因此，我们在这些国家也开始积极建立团队。
附英文原文：
Bill Sullivan, president and CEO of Agilent, sat down with Electronic News/Electronic Business to talk about the company’s new focus, the recent divestitures, and the convergence of multiple d isciplines in science. What follows are excerpts of that interview.
Q: What was behind Agilent’s decision to spin off your semiconductor and semiconductor test businesses, and how has the company done since then?
Sullivan: We made the decision in August 2005 to focus the company 100 percent on the $40 billion measurement market. In addition to that, we believe there are billions of dollars of additional opportunities associated with the measurement industry.
Q: So that became your single core competency?
Sullivan: Yes. That was what Hewlett-Packard was founded on, and we have since gone back to what we did the best. We made the decision to divest the semiconductor-related businesses because it’s a different business model. It’s a more volatile market, and the company was being valued on how we did in the semiconductor business, not our core measurement business. That’s what drove the decision. If you look at the last 10 years up until now, the growth rate of the core measurement business was higher than the growth rate of the semiconductor business, and the volatility was one-third of what the company had been over the past 10 years. We created Avago, which is a very competitive semiconductor company, and Verigy is a very competitive semiconductor test business. In the process, we’ve returned $5 billion in cash to our stockholders.
Q: From a research standpoint, have those divestitures had any effect?
Sullivan: It’s hard to argue with being a focused organization. Our core competency is measurement science. It always has been. Our semiconductor component effort was driven out of the needs of Hewlett-Packard. Now, moving forward, we are focusing 100 percent of our efforts on measurement science. We have reorganized our central research lab, focusing on electronic measurement, life sciences measurement, and new measurement technologies such as in the nanotechnology area and homeland security.
Q: Many of the new technology developments are being measured in Angstroms. Does that raise the cost of research?
Sullivan: We’re spending about 12 percent of our overall expenses on research and development. This is competitive in the industry. We also have a worldwide footprint for our research, so we are developing research in Southeast Asia, China and India to supplement our activity in Japan, the United States and Europe. Clearly, this is an industry that requires high R&D at the leading edge to remain a supplier of choice.
Q: But there are lots of unknowns at the leading edge of technology. How do you choose the right direction for your R&D investment?
Sullivan: One of the key roles of our central lab is to look at macro trends in various markets and to anticipate and be there with these trends moving forward. It’s well documented that with Moore’s Law physics and biology are coming together. What we need to figure out are the best measurement techniques to allow scientists to innovate and commercialize. We have a whole team of people inside of Labs working with businesses, industry and academia to try to identify those needs—we’re very attuned to the top universities and government research in the world—and then we make our best bets for Agilent.
Q: Are there any roadblocks to what you can measure and what you can’t?
Sullivan: Will there be laws and technical hurdles to face? Yes. Are we even close to insurmountable barriers? I think the answer is no. When you go into life science, we’re only beginning to understand cell biology. Some people talk about molecular computing. From my perspective, we just have infinite choices. Agilent Labs just introduced the first measurement of micro-RNA, which was only invented five years ago. These structures are in the 10- to 15-nanometer range. I think you’re going to see discovery in the chemical, physical and life science worlds.
Q: How much of your business is coming from life sciences?
Sullivan: The company last year was essentially 70 percent electronic measurement (40 percent of that business was semiconductors before the divestitures) and 30 percent life sciences and chemical analysis.. However, our life sciences/chemical analysis business is the fastest growing part of our business. This year, you’re going to see life sciences becoming a larger percentage of our company. We just completed the acquisition of Strategene, which is a re-agent company that uses chemicals to react with a specimen to try to get better measurement results. Our number one investment and growth opportunity is in the life sciences area. This is a great example of where we can take some of the best analog and digital converters from our electronics expertise and apply it to this market to improve the resolution of the mass spec measurements of, for example, the detection of proteins. How do we take these measurement technologies and move them into these new opportunities? When you think about measurement, we always tend to look at the physical world—measuring a photon, electron or molecule. Our job is to turn it into the digital domain and digitalize it so that engineers, scientists and researchers have a different insight. That’s really where it’s going. About 70 percent of our engineers are software engineers. How do you digitalize it in such a way that they can seen nuances that help them in their discovery?
Q: Isn’t that modeling?
Sullivan: Modeling tends to be a very defined role, such as measuring a radar system or modeling a simulation of a wireless city. This goes further. How do you map out data so that people can see something they wouldn’t have seen consistently with their past models? The future is creating new models, but to do that you have to have the ideas and the concepts from the old models and visualize data so you can create new associations looking forward. That’s what so exciting about life sciences. It’s in its infancy, and it’s an associative science. People are making associations because they don’t have ab solute models about how it works.
Q: Do you see moving into a different role in the future? You are bridging electronics, spectroscopy and massive data searches.
Sullivan: That is the bet of Agilent. Having the breadth of technology, can we bring this technology synergy with our financial strength to differentiate ourselves in this $40 billion measurement market? The market is highly fragmented with lots of different applications. Through an acquisition and through our technical support we’ve entered into the top atomic force microscope market. How do we bring sophisticated, complicated tools to the desk of the scientist at a competitive price to accelerate learning?
Q: We’ve largely been focused in the electronics industry on the atomic level. Is the subatomic level in your sights yet?
Sullivan: We’ve had a big debate about that internally. Nobody has seen it yet, and I don’t know when that will happen. But people are really smart. They will figure it out. The biggest potential is the continued understanding of cell biology and the very sophisticated mechanism of what goes on inside of a cell that results in disease. There’s a tremendous opportunity for us to measure that, visualize it and model it so people can continue making advancements. It’s basically how do you prevent chronic disease earlier in life.
Q: Much of this involves multiple disciplines. How do you bring together and train cross-functional teams?
Sullivan: It goes back to the leadership of the team, to be able to create a common focus and integrate the input moving forward. There’s been a lot of work on how a biologist thinks versus a physicist. We’ve spent a lot of time understanding where people come from and how they look at problems. There is a different way of looking at a problem. That lays on top of the core values of Agilent. If you look it from the legacy of HP—uncompromising integrity, teamwork, respect for the individual technical contribution—that’s the foundation. We put an enormous value on people working together for common purposes. If you put in a good leader built on a culture of understanding about how people think, it’s amazing what we can do. We’ve also cross-pollinated with some of the physicists moving across organizations to bring that discipline. But it’s the ecosystem you create. As I visit universities around the world, they’re the process of creating their own ecosystems to get these disciplines to work together and get the best out of them and advance the problem solving on very difficult problems.
Q: What sorts of issues are you seeing between different disciplines approaching a problem?
Sullivan: In the very simplest terms, the world of physics—in the physical world, not the atomic world—is very predictive. There are very clear equations of predictability. They tend to look for equation-based solutions. Biology is so complicated they tend to look at associations. If you look at a DNA array, does it turn green, does it express? You do mappings of DNA. The physicist says, ‘Where’s the equation?’ The biologist says, ‘We don’t have one.’ If you’ve ever seen the mapping of a protein that has mutated and is going to cause cancer and all the pathways, it’s very, very complicated. You tend to see more imaging and association and data to extract information and decisions moving forward.
Q: When you’re doing these measurements, are you looking for aberrations in a pattern?
Sullivan: Sometimes an aberration does not result in disease. You can go through 100 people and say chromosome 14 is bad and may cause cancer, but in fact only half the people get cancer. Why is that?
Q: Let’s go back a second and talk about the cross-discipline teams. What are the characteristics of the leaders of these teams?
Sullivan: The leadership model in is very simple. We expect the leaders of these teams to have absolute clarity of what we call strategic intent of where we’re going and how do we get there. The second elem ent is how these individuals build the organizational capability to get there. At the end of the day, every company can have the same aspirations and goals. It’s the organizational capability that gets results. These leaders need an enormous amount of domain content to get credibility. They then have to attract the brightest and the best, and lead them to results. I personally believe the core of leadership is the ability to take personal risk. You have to integrate all these inputs and you have to make a decision. They also need to have passion—passion to win, passion to want to make a contribution—and they have to couple that with strong technical skills. It’s amazing what people can do when they’re bright and aligned there is the right capability on the team.
Q: Where are you finding these people?
Sullivan: We will be hiring close to 2,000 people this year. We have a concentrated effort in the universities to try to attract the brightest and the best. We also look out into the industry to bring in talent. We have brought in quite a few new business managers. Right now, our ability to attract people is very high.
Q: What other countries are starting to play a role in research?
Sullivan: The emergence of China and India are, in my opinion, the biggest economic disruption in the world. As a result, we have been aggressively building strong teams in these countries. That’s part of our heritage. Hewlett-Packard moved into Germany in the ’50s, Japan in the ’60s and South east Asia in the ’70s. David Packard had the first joint high-tech venture in China in the ’80s. So we have a long history of building strong teams in other countries.
