Ed. note: The following was submitted to me by Peter Clout. It is from a LANL blog and resonated with a number of people: Comments are always welcome!

The current LANL management team certainly seems to have mishandled their assignment, but in all fairness, managing a lab full of scientists is never easy, and no director is going to make everyone happy. Scientists taken as a group (though individuals vary, of course) have several characteristics which tend to make them harder than average to manage successfully:
a) They are experts in their own field, and often think that automatically makes them experts in other fields, when it doesn't. They would readily see the absurdity of, say, an experienced industrial program manager undertaking to design a nuclear weapon, but don’t see the equal absurdity in thinking that they could better manage their own large development programs without professional help. There is a tendency among many scientists to think that by virtue of their extensive training and expertise they know best, both inside their field of expertise and outside of it. A study of the history of science might introduce just a dash of humility to this view, but few scientists study such “irrelevant” fields.
b) As others in this blog have commented, there is often a level of arrogance mixed with naiveté. One blog poster, for example, asserted that a PhD in physics is the hardest PhD to earn (I presume because this poster has also earned PhDs in biochemistry, mathematics, history, and linguistics, among others and can make a comparison…). Many posters seem naively to assume that no one else is really up to the intellectual level of the LANL scientific staff, and certainly not anyone at Sandia or UT or in any of the likely industrial partners, and this is not that uncommon a view among scientists at large. It often doesn’t seem to occur to scientists that there are many, many other fields every bit as complex and demanding as their own, and that some of those working in those fields are every bit their intellectual equals.
c) Many good scientists have the “Feynman” tendency to resent authority and imposed structure on general principles, whether it makes sense or not. In fact, the ability to think outside the box and question established views is one of the strengths of a good scientist, and one certainly doesn’t want to extinguish it, but at the same time it often does make scientists hard to manage as a group.
d) Many scientists (though by no mean all) are largely oblivious to much of the world outside their own field of study, and hence don’t really understand or value those around them who make their own work possible – such as the mechanics and machinists who build their experimental equipment, the upper managers who play the political games in Washington to assure their budgets (arguably a far more complex and difficult field than simple physics!), the IT folks who keep their computer networks running, and the vast support staff who deal with the legal issues, the purchasing issues, the building maintenance issues, etc. etc. There is a tendency among scientists (actually, among academics in any field) to look down on these people as a “lesser breed,” and to resent any process they might have put in place to make their own jobs possible. This tends to make it difficult for many scientists to work well in large organizations of any kind, whether it is a research lab or not – and by the way, it breeds a lot of resentment among all those undervalued and underappreciated support people who work hard to support the scientist’s efforts.
So I would urge the LANL staff to back off a bit from all the personal attacks on current, past, and possible future lab managers, and understand that managing a large group of highly individualistic scientists is going to be hard for anyone to do, and no director and no university sponsor or industrial partner is going to make everyone happy.
In the end, as one recent blog poster noted, no one is going to come in and “save” LANL -- LANL is going to have to save itself, and that will have to start with the whole staff pulling together as a team toward the common goal of restoring LANL to its pervious glory, rather than bitching and bickering and backstabbing each other, as has happened rather too often in this blog.
It would be nice to see some constructive discussion start on this blog, focused on what LANL [Ed. comment – and other labs] needs to do from this point forward to succeed, rather than on rehashing the sins of the past.