I can’t remember the thread, but in another thread a couple of posters were talking about how at tech companies there were some employees who were basically considered ‘consultants’, which in practice meant that they were paid a salary to just do whatever they wanted, because the company knew they were smart enough to find problems and innovate solutions to them. They were smarter than the people who would’ve pointed out problems or tried to come up with solutions, so it was just easier to let them do whatever they wanted. Thats the impression at least.
The macarthur genius grant also does this. They find talented people and just give them money and let them spend it how they like, because they are capable of figuring out the best way to use the money.
Is there a term for this, where someone has shown themselves to be creative, intelligent, competent, etc and the public or private sector realizes the best thing to do isn’t to tell them what problem to solve, but to just give them a blank check and let them decide what problem to solve and how to solve it?
If they’re a researcher working at a university or private non-profit research institute, I’d call them a PI (principal investigator). They’re not all that unusual – I used to be one myself. You come up with your own problem, convince some private or public funding agency that the best thing for you to do is to work on it for a certain number of years, and they give you the money you need. Or rather, they give the money to your university or institute, who takes a cut for overhead (to help pay the rent, utilities, admin and technical staff, etc.) and uses the rest to pay your salary and your expenses according to your self-defined budget (which can run to millions of dollars). The programs at some funding agencies are very laissez-faire about what you do with the money; you can sometimes set your own salary (within reason) and you might have broad freedom to change the research plan you initially proposed. Others practice something called “contract research” where you need to stick closely to your plan, and give regular status reports to prove this.
Professors at research universities might also fall into this category, except that most of them have teaching and service duties in addition to their research programs (which they’re free to set for themselves). The university might fund some or all of their research expenses; for whatever isn’t covered, they need to get third-party grants, just like the non-professor PIs.
Even in the purest research institute the permanent fellows, who go by various titles depending on the place, are paid… to do research. One relevant term is “basic research”, which means they are not driven to develop technology. A “tech company” may not hire so many philosophers as theoretical physicists, however. Luckily, not all funding comes from private (or military…) hands, but, as @psychonaut says, if you have some expensive research project you will need to apply for a grant to make it happen.
This reminds me of a previous thread, which I can’t find just now, about the possibly mythical consultant to an earlier US President who was the ‘misunderstander-in-chief’ tasked with being as dense and oblivious as possible while reviewing speeches and policies before they were finally polished for public release. Never an easy job, it would seem incomprehensibly incomprehensible now…..
Virtually any well-credentialed senior professor in academia fits that description. There’s no special name for it. In private industry, titles like “fellow”, as in the distinguished title of “IBM Fellow” which basically means “scientist at large”, free to do whatever he or she wants.
I was never at that rarefied level myself, but the concept works at lower levels, too. Notwithstanding the sarcasm of the Dilbert cartoon strip, I spent a good portion of my career working for a company (not IBM, but similar industry) that truly understood and embraced the meaning of “empowerment”. It was the company philosophy that employees were empowered to do whatever it takes, go wherever necessary, talk to anyone they needed to talk to, to get the job done. And moreover, they were empowered (obviously within reason) to define the scope of their own jobs.
It’s absolutely amazing the kind of commitment to their jobs that you can get from thousands of employees when each one feels like they own the place – or at least,. absolutely own the space within which they work – which in a real and practical sense they should feel like they do and act accordingly.
I worked at a research institute for 28 years. One thing to be cognizant of is that the “superstar/genius researcher” is often anything but. Most the time they’re only an expert in one thing: the fine art of making themselves look good. It’s all about perception. The real work is done by others, and they simply take credit for it. And then they get lots of recognition, awards, and accolades for it.
There are definitely “real deal” geniuses out there. But they tend to be the ones quietly working in the lab.
The science museum in Cleveland has one guy on staff who’s basically just a mad scientist (impressively, he’s not even the only professional mad scientist in Cleveland). He’d basically just do whatever cool things he thought of, and sometimes, it’d become the basis for a new demonstration or exhibit. IIRC, his official job title was just “Resident Scientist”.
At Sun Microsystems in their heyday, according to people who worked there (I never did), there was a status informally known as ‘The Golden Toilet Seat’. Meaning someone had hit a real home run on something, so were subsequently allowed to work on whatever they wanted.
I have no idea if its true, or just part of the the mythologising that went with its ascendancy, but I understand that Google HQ techy people were allowed to spend something like one day per week on pursuing their own ideas / passion projects.
To me, that sort of arrangement seems like a good investment in staff and also a good use of money, if they get patent rights for whatever good ideas come from that process. The chance to do your own thing will increase your happiness as an employee, reduce absenteeism and going elsewhere, and be a lot cheaper than trying to invest in external innovation processes.
To answer the OP, the name for people who just get paid to be geniuses is ‘lucky’.
That was real in the early days. Provided you already got your 60 hours of real work done first. Or at least so I recall a former employee blogging about.
There was some business strategy book that spoke of the “deep smarts” that companies accumulated to manage the science and technology at the core of their business. I think they described this as one of the intangibles of value. My company bought into this view, and would sometimes refer to the “deep smarts people” in whom this expertise was held. I think the point was more that they were experts, not necessarily geniuses. One feature of this phenomenon was that most employees learned that there were people to whom they could go with questions, but the experts were often the end of the line – that is, there was nobody left that the expert could go to in the company.