Meanwhile, Deetz had hired Sembrowich as a consultant in April 1988, soon after Sembrowich left Arden, which had been sold to Johnson & Johnson a year and a half earlier. Deetz, as head of R&D, recruited another consultant, Doug Hillier, to write the business plan for the new division and subsequently persuaded him to become the sensor unit's general manager. In effect, Hillier became Deetz's boss in La Jolla. Meanwhile, Hillier was quickly proving to be a deft corporate player. His earlier consulting work for PPG gave him standing among managers in the corporation's marketing department. Hillier had initially resisted coming to work full-time for PPG until Deetz filled him in on his plans. "His eyes really lit up. He said, 'This may be the product of the decade," recalls Deetz.
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In early 1989 in the wake of the successful prototype development, Hillier wrote a glowing performance review of Deetz, noting that he had done "an outstanding job in setting up the sensor facility." Giving Deetz a raise and a bonus, Hillier concluded that Deetz was "working at greater than 100%."
As head of R&D for the unit, Deetz proved to be a maverick manager. He ran the unit like a family, buying a $165 grill for the deck at the office, something around which team spirit could flourish. When managers in Pittsburgh called and on more than one occasion were informed that Deetz's unit was "out grilling on the deck," eyebrows were raised.
Deetz's unorthodox style did not sit well with everyone. "He's probably one of the five top guys in the world in his field. He's a star. He's quick -- for some people almost too quick," says one observer. Deetz's cause in La Jolla was the carbon dioxide battery, and he did not shrink from championing it. But as he began to push, corporate inertia pushed back. Getting into production, not crafting breakthrough technology, was PPG's priority. Moreover, Deetz met with skepticism from his fellow scientists. No one else believed that the gas battery could be developed. Even Kee Van Sin, a scientist on the team who would later follow Deetz to Diametrics, says, "The gas battery was not in the mainstream. I was the one closest to it, and I didn't think it would work."
Those doubts and pressure from PPG to produce clashed with Deetz's commitment to the gas battery and resulted in nothing less than mutiny in late April 1989, when Hillier sent Deetz out of town to a symposium. In Deetz's absence, the scientific team met and took a secret vote on what calibration technique to pursue. The members chose a more conservative approach that they believed they could make work.
When Deetz returned he was told by Hillier that he had to fall in line and support the alternative approach. "I was unwilling to go along with the consensus that we were done," says Deetz. "Why all of a sudden were all those people just marching blindly into this project?" Hillier subsequently brought in an industrial psychologist who did exhaustive interviews -- up to four hours in length -- of the scientific team to determine the psychological makeup of its members and their ability to get along with one another. That was a ploy, claims Deetz, simply to marshal more evidence to show that Deetz was not a team player. Hillier subsequently moved up Deetz's performance review from January to October. That review gave Deetz the lowest marks possible except for a category dubbed "takes responsibility for his actions." Finally in December Hillier fired Deetz, claiming he was dividing the scientific team.
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Deetz returned to Minnesota in January 1990 and reconnected with Walt Sembrowich, who had started another company to build glucose analyzers. In April they joined forces and incorporated Diametrics Medical. Sembrowich was a believer in the carbon dioxide battery -- mainly because he was a believer in Deetz. "I have a lot of confidence in Dave's ability to think things through. If he tells you he thinks he can make something work scientifically, it's going to work."
Sembrowich had witnessed Deetz's brilliance -- and his tenacity -- firsthand. He recalls Deetz's persistence in persuading him to be a consultant at PPG. "I had just called Dave. I told him I was leaving Arden Medical. He flew out from San Diego. I drove home from work on my last day, and he was parked in my driveway. He said, 'We gotta talk.' I told him I was burned out. I was gonna take the summer off and play golf. The next Monday I was in San Diego."
Diametrics would go on to raise $22 million in venture capital. It set to work on developing the technology. Deetz hired a Ph.D. chemist, Russ Morris, who developed a computer model of the battery's complex chemistry. "There are 30 different chemical activities taking place at any one time in the battery," says Morris. "It's not Einstein stuff. It's puzzle work."
The puzzle took more than two years to solve. The U.S. Patent Office issued Deetz and Morris a patent for the carbon dioxide battery on July 27, 1993. The patent ran to 200 pages and described a humble-looking device, a sealed plastic pouch of water about two inches square. The battery -- the "enabling technology" -- contained as much carbon dioxide as the air on one floor in a good-sized office building. It made it possible to calibrate the analyzer, and made IRMA reliable and easy to use.
The gas battery that Deetz had fought for in vain at PPG would cost Diametrics less than 2¢ to manufacture. And it would unlock a $3-billion market.
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While Diametrics was breaking through, PPG was struggling, the trial transcript reveals. In December 1991, it introduced a portable analyzer, called Statpal I, that featured a manual calibration system. PPG projected sales of the device in 1992 at $9.8 million. The Statpal I actually produced $400,000 in revenues in 1992 before PPG withdrew it from the market.
PPG replaced the machine in December 1992 with Statpal II, projecting $10 million in sales for 1993. Through July 1993, sales of the Statpal II amounted to less than $500,000. An internal PPG report from marketing to Doug Hillier noted that "failure rates appear to be greater than 15%." Referring to the calibration process, the report further stated that "some characterize our procedure as a step backward from the highly automated conventional systems."
