‘Harvard Business Review’: ‘Genius’ Awards

Very few people are exceptionally creative, Daniel J. Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program tells Harvard Business Review (June). “The truth seems to be that the kind of creativity that leads to new things and important breakthroughs is incredibly hard to find.”

Mr. Socolow, who runs the program many people call the “genius” prizes — no-strings-attached awards of $500,000 — says it is unrealistic for organizations to think any one group can recruit a large number of creative people. “What you probably ought to do instead is to very carefully select those few you think are really creative and give them the time and money and oxygen to flourish.”

He also tells the Review that “exceptionally creative people aren’t always the obvious suspects.” Many people who are good at promoting themselves are not truly creative; many winners of the MacArthur prizes have previously been unknown and ignored, he says. “So don’t assume that you can figure out who your creative people are all by yourself. Listen to others and look in the least likely places.”

While people inside an organization might be useful to listen to, he says, people outside the organization might have a more useful perspective.

“Creative people we look at have often ruffled a few feathers along the way,” he says, so don’t always expect people who are creative to be popular.

In the interview, Mr. Socolow, who has run the fellows program since 1997, provides a few glimpses inside the secretive process of selecting the winners. He says the dozen or so people who consider the recommendations — all of which are received from anonymous nominators — serve for three to five years “and are the most important players in the process.”

Selecting them is as hard as picking the fellows, he says. The group typically includes “a philosopher, an artist, a futurist, a molecular biologist, a lawyer, a journalist, an astrophysicist — people who are themselves extraordinarily interesting, extremely successful and well connected, and as close to Renaissance people as one can find. When these folks get together their meetings are magical events: Their exchanges and deliberations cross many disciplines and are almost indescribably rich and deep.”

Mr. Socolow has also learned how to break the news to a new “genius” award winner. “When I first started making these calls, a few people almost choked or fainted,” he recalls. “I now make sure that they pull over if they are driving a car or sit down.” He says he called one woman in New York who was standing near a bed store. “She asked me to give her a moment, walked into the store, lay down on a mattress, and continued the conversation.”

The article is available for a fee or to paid subscribers of the magazine at http://hbr.org.