There are a number of fellowship programs whose goal is to recognize extraordinarily gifted and creative people. Very few have etched themselves on the American imagination as powerfully as the MacArthur Fellows Program. Like the Pulitzer Prize or the Rhodes scholarship, the MacArthur is widely seen as one of the awards to win—remarkably, given that the fellowship, one of the first major programs of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is only in its 27th year. The MacArthur is, to be sure, a generous prize: Recipients get half a million dollars with no strings attached. It’s not the money that gives the award its cachet, however; rather, it’s the validation—the recognition that the winner is an exceptionally creative person in his or her field, deserving of a “genius grant,” as the fellowship is popularly called. That can inspire a great deal of self-congratulation, and not a little envy on the part of colleagues and competitors who missed out. Although nobody can apply for a MacArthur, many can aspire to one. Recipients must reside in the United States or be American citizens; otherwise there are almost no restrictions on who can win (the IRS has ruled out senior-level government officeholders and employees). A record of achievement counts, but fellows need not be publicly acclaimed writers or scientists or mathematicians. The success of the program suggests that it has worked out a pretty reliable way of picking winners. Although the MacArthur selectors have anointed many obscure people over the years, in relatively few cases have critics called the award unmerited. What’s more, unlike the Nobel Prize, to which it is sometimes compared, the MacArthur is more than an award for past achievement; winners are expected to use it to take their abilities to a new level, and in many cases they have done just that. In the business world, “creativity” has become the latest buzzword. Corporations, no less than the MacArthur Fellows Program, are interested in identifying and attracting unusually creative talent—the kind that will come up with the next Lipitor, Walkman, or iPod. How to find, nurture, and direct these people is an enduring topic in business literature, particularly since commentators started talking about the knowledge economy and human capital. To find out more about the lessons the MacArthur program can offer to businesses, HBR senior editor Diane Coutu approached the program’s director, Daniel J. Socolow, for a contribution to the magazine. Socolow, who has run the program since 1997, brings to the job the same richness of experience that characterizes many of the fellows. In the 1960s he lived in Argentina and worked for the Ford Foundation on its grant programs for Argentine universities, which were struggling to reestablish themselves after a series of political and economic crises. In the early 1970s he set up one of the first programs in Canadian studies at a U.S. university. In the late 1970s he was appointed a vice president of Spelman College, a black women’s college since 1881. Socolow has also served as president of the American University of Paris and as a senior adviser and the director of programs at the Carter Center, in Atlanta. Before joining the MacArthur Foundation, he helped start a number of companies, most notably Third Age Media, an early interactive site for linking older Americans and the Internet. In the following edited conversation, which took place at the MacArthur Foundation offices in Chicago, Socolow explains the stages of the selection process and what factors the selectors take into consideration when choosing fellows. He discusses the award’s impact on winners and suggests what business leaders might learn from the program. Does someone have to be a genius to win a MacArthur? The concept of genius is far too limiting when describing MacArthur fellows. Genius is a measurement of intelligence—it’s an immensely high IQ. The people we’re looking for have razor-sharp intelligence, but they add to that a lot of other qualities, such as boldness, commitment, resilience, and persistence. We’re looking for people who are trying to come up with something new, who play at putting things together in novel ways. There’s no easy definition for that. That’s why we use somewhat messy terms like “exceptional creativity,” “outstanding talent,” “extraordinary originality,” “insight,” and “potential.” We’re intentionally ambiguous, because once we try to define what we’re looking for, we lose the power to consider many different kinds of people. For us, the possibilities are endless. That means that side by side with an economist, a geneticist, and a physicist, you can find among the MacArthur fellows a farmer, a fisherman, a blacksmith, and a nurse. There are 732 people who have been selected to date, and there are 732 different stories of the ways in which these people are creative. There is simply no single profile. The youngest MacArthur fellow was 18; the oldest was 82. Fellows come from inside and outside the academy. We keep looking, but the strongest pattern is that there is no pattern. Why don’t businesspeople win the fellowship? Aren’t they creative? There’s no question that people of extraordinary creativity and originality are in business. The founders of Google are incredible. So are Steve Jobs and so many others. Our reasoning is that the market is a very effective support system for the best ideas in business. We serve those who do not fall under the influence of the market. That’s not to say that artists don’t live in the market economy, but we think that their driving motivations and rewards are different. And that’s precisely why the money is an important part of the fellowship. Look at the freedom and time this relatively modest five-year fellowship—with absolutely no obligations—can confer on an artist or scientist whose ability to experiment is often constrained by the need to satisfy the requirements of outside funders. We do keep a lookout for entrepreneurs who are in their garages at the cusp of major new advances. In the main, though, venture capital folks get there before we do, as they should. I’m not saying that we will never give a MacArthur fellowship to someone in business. They’re not officially exempt. But we have yet to consider a business nominee for whom the market wasn’t a better source of support than we would be—and didn’t offer far more resources than we ever could. I’m not saying that we will never give a MacArthur fellowship to someone in business. They’re not officially exempt. To judge from the way people talk about it, though, the award means more than just money. Absolutely. The recognition is powerful. When people learn that they’ve won a fellowship, they certainly talk about the pivotal role that the money will play. They talk much, much more about the affirmation the fellowship conveys. A MacArthur provides powerful validation that the fellow’s work really matters, that other people have taken note. It opens doors for people, whatever the field. The award also represents a kind of personal fulfillment of a secret yearning. We all secretly believe that we don’t get sufficient approval for our work, that we are deserving of more money, status, and recognition than we have received. A fellowship is the acknowledgment by somebody else that you are fantastic—not your sibling, not your uncle, not your cousin, but you. The MacArthur represents the fulfillment of a secret yearning. We all secretly believe that we don’t get sufficient approval for our work, that we are deserving of more money, status, and recognition than we have received. Don’t businesspeople need this kind of affirmation? Yes, certainly. But I don’t think that we are the ones necessarily to provide it. Business can try to replicate our model, but it is not easy to do so. (See the sidebar “What Might Business Leaders Learn from the MacArthur Fellows Program?”) That’s because our model has elements that many in business might not feel totally comfortable with. There really are no strings attached to this fellowship—that’s an essential part of the definition of the program. Once a year we call people up and say, “Guess what? We’ve been looking at you, we think you’re terrific, and we think you know far better than we do how best to use this award. You’re going to get half a million dollars over the next five years, and you’re never going to hear from us again.” Think about that. It totally reverses the normal funder-recipient relationship. It’s a wonderful experiment—and one, I suspect, that many in business might have trouble reproducing. What Might Business Leaders Learn from the MacArthur Fellows Program? I am not an expert on business, but it seems to me that it would be hard for most businesses to replicate the MacArthur model perfectly. You really can’t do it unless you can give some people in your organization unlimited time and a lot of money to do whatever they might want to do. How feasible is that in most contexts? Businesspeople have to be accountable to bankers and shareholders. Conditions are always attached to their funding. Even so, business leaders just might be able to provide a small number of people in their companies with more freedom than most are providing now. What we have learned from the fellowship program is that very few people are extraordinarily creative. I can’t tell you how many times we have tried to imagine a better, more efficient way to find the people we seek—to select 25 to 30 people a year without having to go through the enormously time-consuming process we follow and to involve hundreds of nominators and thousands of evaluators. The truth seems to be that the kind of creativity that leads to new things and important breakthroughs is extremely hard to find. So if, as a business, you’re looking for a way to surround yourself with exceptionally creative people, forget it. You’re on the wrong track. It won’t happen. What you probably ought to do instead is to very carefully select those few you think are really creative and then give them the time and money and oxygen to flourish. Now, it may not be fashionable today to single out a few people, but it is one sure way to foster true originality and creativity. Another thing we’ve learned over the years is that exceptionally creative people aren’t always the obvious suspects. It is a common trap in all areas—I’m sure in business, too—to give the limelight to people whose success isn’t the result of any special creativity on their part. They are just very good at promoting themselves. We have found that many of our winners are people whom others might never have thought of, at first, as MacArthur candidates. Many were unknown and ignored. 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. As a business, you will probably start your search inside the organization. But to get a really good fix on somebody on the inside, you might want to ask those on the outside. Extend your networks and try to get information from as many people as possible, just as we do with the many evaluation letters we seek. Finally, when going outside for reviews, don’t look for unanimity. Ours is not a popularity contest, and the creative people we look at have often ruffled a few feathers along the way. We have not been afraid of investing in such people, and if you want to find outstandingly creative people for your organization, you shouldn’t be afraid either. Are your reservations about supporting businesspeople also connected to the program’s emphasis on social contribution? Not really. A lot of businesses have, after all, made enormous social contributions. Our rule is that you’ve got to be doing something that adds to our wealth of knowledge or understanding of the world or to improvements in the ways we live. To take a trivial example, we aren’t likely to give a fellowship to an inventor who’s made a widget that allows homemakers to change the color of a washing machine at will, even if the science involved is elegant. We’d be far more interested if the widget cut the energy consumption of all household appliances in half. That would make a difference to the planet. We also don’t award people only for what they have done in the past. We certainly look at the body of work, but we’re betting on the outstanding work the fellows will do in the future. Recognition of that potential is where our risk taking comes in, and our view on this is that we must manage our risk by not being afraid of it. It’s still too soon to get a real sense of the full measure of our decisions—the MacArthur is only going into its 27th year. We’re betting that 25 or 50 years from now a significant share of the fellows we have picked since the inception of the program will have made very, very important contributions to society. Have you ever measured the productivity of the people who’ve won the MacArthur? Over the years, we have asked for and commissioned voluntary assessments of the impact of the award on the fellows’ work and lives. We have not, however, sought to measure “productivity.” We pick people who are exceptional already, people who are visionary artists, brilliant scientists, inspiring people doing important things in the public arena. We would feel very uncomfortable taking credit for the next book, the next volume of poems, the next scientific discovery, or the next pieces of art. We believe that creativity is a qualitative and not a quantitative matter, and if you start counting books or counting prizes or anything else, you are fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the creative process. There is another reason we do not try to measure output. We think that by conferring a fellowship we transfer a heavy sense of responsibility to the individual. It’s so easy when you get a regular grant to write a report, do an evaluation, and be done with it. You can’t, however, get out from under the MacArthur fellowship that easily. For many, it follows them throughout their lives. Once you’ve won a MacArthur, the expectations that come from other people are quite high and remain high. I think many fellows feel impelled to prove to themselves and others that we were right in selecting them. Who does the nominating? Nominators work confidentially and anonymously. The anonymity of the nominators is key, because if you can’t find them, you can’t launch a networking campaign to get selected. Throughout the year, the fellowship program invites hundreds of nominators from a great many fields, each of whom serves a single eight-week term. During the course of a year, nominators come up with hundreds of names—sometimes 1,000 or more. Among these nominations, we focus on a fairly large group who appear most compelling as candidates, and we begin to “develop” their files. At any given moment we’re actively developing some 300 to 400 files, which in each case involves reviewing materials written by the person, listening to his music, looking at her art, and so on. Developing files also requires seeking letters from as many peer and expert evaluators as we can identify, sometimes 20, 30, or more. These evaluators may be colleagues of the nominee; they are always people who know the field and the nominee’s standing in that field. If we’re looking at a violin maker, for example, we will seek musicians and other violin makers as evaluators; we will also talk to experts in acoustics, in design, and in woodworking. To make sure that the evaluators feel as free to comment as possible, we pledge that no one outside the fellowship selection process will ever see their letters. That’s how we encourage and ensure responses that are often a lot more direct and helpful than the typical tenure or employment reference letter. How do you actually choose the fellows? Final recommendations are made to the foundation’s board by a group of people we call selectors. Throughout the year, this external selection committee meets in full-day sessions to review and evaluate the merits of those nominees whose files have “ripened”—the ones who come out really singing to us as being potentially quite astonishing. Selectors are the most important players in the process. There are about a dozen of them at any one time, and they serve three- to five-year terms. A group of selectors might include 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. Putting together a group of selectors can be as challenging as picking a class of fellows. How do you find nominators and selectors? The whole process is very fluid. Nominators are suggested by the selectors, by other nominators, by board members, by evaluators, and by members of the program staff. Many others are identified among our very large pool of evaluators each year. Our database of potential nominators is quite large and always growing. We also do specific research in new areas where we have not yet had success finding fellows, and we invite people to be nominators in such areas. The selectors, for their part, are formally appointed by the board of the foundation, after being vetted by the foundation’s president, the chair of the selection committee, and me. There is something in the air in this country that encourages those who participate in the program to keep our confidence—to serve anonymously. This is really quite extraordinary and not, from my experience, common in the United States or anywhere else. Selectors—and even nominators and evaluators—by and large refrain from revealing their roles in our process, even years out. The only time I’ve heard of a selector going public was in an obituary, when the family members were so proud of his involvement in the MacArthur selection process that they wrote about it at the time of his death. Maintaining confidentiality rarely happens in most settings. It does here in large part because participants recognize the importance of confidentiality in ensuring the program’s objectivity. As a result, this is a very hard program to game—you just can’t find anyone to influence. The only person in the program you can get to is me, and the beauty of it is that I can’t nominate anyone. So people can tell me anything they want. This is a very hard program to game—you just can’t find anyone to influence. The only person you can get to is me, and the beauty of it is that I can’t nominate anyone. Do women have greater difficulty winning a MacArthur? The number of woman fellows has increased significantly over time as women’s roles in society have shifted. Women are still not nominated as frequently as men, even though we work hard to ensure that they are as well represented among the nominators. Women are every bit as creative as men—just look at those who do receive MacArthur fellowships each year. It is possible that differences in career paths and competing demands on their time still hold women back from taking unconventional directions and challenging accepted boundaries. The gap in numbers of nominations is closing, however, and that is encouraging. Personally, I get very excited when a majority of women are selected as fellows in a particular year. That’s happened only once in my ten years here and only a couple of times before that. But the numbers of men and women are usually very close now. Do you specifically look for risk takers? It’s part of the equation in most instances. I think for some people, perhaps for most, trying something new and approaching challenges freshly requires an element of risk taking. A skydiver is a risk taker too, daring and full of guts, but he or she is not likely to capture our attention. On second thought, I can think of an instance or two where a skydiver might just be of interest to us, but I’d rather leave it at that. Typically, a MacArthur involves risk taking in the context of being smart and driven to move from what is tried and comfortable, to get off center. We see this kind of mix in a lot of fellows. But there are also many cases in which risk taking, at least as it is commonly understood, is not at the center of the extraordinary creativity we reward. For example, we selected a scholar of the classics who was also a papyrologist and an expert in the art and craft of rescuing damaged texts. He opened new windows for us all, but his risk taking—such as it is—is subtle. It is just too simplistic to say categorically that all creative people are risk takers. What is the most unusual response you’ve heard when you’ve called a winner? When I tell people I’m calling from the MacArthur Fellows Program, there’s often a stunned silence for half a minute or so. Remember, unlike Oscar winners and most Nobel laureates, these people have absolutely no idea they are under consideration. When I first started making these calls, a few people almost choked or fainted. I now make sure that they pull over if they are driving a car, or that they sit down, put a baby down if they’re holding one, and take a deep breath. In New York a couple of years ago, a woman 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. Surprisingly, nobody hangs up. It gets back, perhaps, to the fact that in all of us there is the belief that the magic could happen to us. It’s a hope that many harbor. On average, women tend to be more open in the one conversation we have on the phone. They share their dreams. Women have told me that the MacArthur is a suit of armor, that the fellowship is a gift of wings, that it will break the trade-offs they have had to make all their lives. Men often talk about it as leveling the playing field in important ways, and as freeing them to be still bolder and to take more risks. Both men and women frequently say the timing of the award was perfect. In fact, I don’t remember anyone’s saying that it was the wrong time, that the award should have been given years earlier. We don’t hear that even from the older fellows. A MacArthur can be—often is—life changing. Who couldn’t use a little more recognition and money at any time in their lives?
