Hard Facts: Innovation
More wisdom from Hard Facts:
Harvard Business Review has published at least three articles on incentive pay and organizational performance in the past decade. … Each makes a similar point: compensating people for only individual performance creates more problems than it solves, so rewards should emphasize organizational, not just individual, performance. … Not one of these articles refers to the prior article, because HBR precludes footnotes and … discourages references to prior work. (pp.43,44)
James March … put it “Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance, and most claims of magic are testimony to hubris.” … Knowledge isn’t generated by lone geniuses who magically produce brilliant new ideas in their gigantic brains. This is a dangerous fiction. … Hackman was troubled because he could only find published success stories about companies that had redesigned work to be more motivating and meaningful. Yet in his experience most redesign efforts were failing. … a study found no significant performance differences between Peters and Waterman’s “excellent” companies and a representative sample of Fortune 1000 companies. (pp.46-48)
Tim
Thanks for your input. Keep coming back.
They aren't lone geniuses. They are very smart people who built on the natural progression of ideas at the time, and often just so happened to be first. Look at Newton and Leibniz. Were they both "lone geniuses"? No, they were simply two smart men who invented the same thing at the same time because it was the logical thing to be invented at that time. And your example of Darwin is laughable. Haven't you ever heard of Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the same theory as Darwin at the same time as Darwin and was published with Darwin?
P.S. Norman Bethune? Seriously? The guy who made blood transfusions portable is an example of a "lone genius"? A pretty damn good field surgeon, I'll grant you, but I don't think he should share space with Châtelet.
P.P.S. Your website suggests you have a vested interest in believing in this "lone genius" theory, as it lays out just the kind of crank theory someone wanting to be a "lone genius" likes to espouse. Unfortunately, reality just doesn't work that way.