Unproductive employees

MDBBATL discusses Radiant Medical, a medical device company that shut down. I agree with his takeaway:

The takeaway: If there are geniuses in your company wasting time with paper work, unnecessary plant closures, too much pow-wow about innovation without actually producing anything, and creating a hostile enough working environment that the company looks like one big revolving door...fire 'em! You already have too much to worry about as a medical device company!

I'm not familiar with what stage Radiant was at when it shut down (I see they at least did some clinicals in 2005 with $36 million), but this advice is particularly true for start ups. If you have unproductive employees it is worse than just paying a worthless salary, it effects the whole company. Other employees see the unproductive behavior and mimic it, maybe not to the entire degree, but some productivity is lost. Even worse is if the employee effects the regulatory end, this is a disaster waiting to happen at a small or start up company.

Everyone needs to be on the same page and management needs to keep the goals clear and well defined, pet projects realistically requiring years of research will not help sales or approvals today.

BTW if anyone knows anymore details I'd be interested, their burn rate of ~$15 million a year seems pretty high, of course it was Redwood City.