Early RAND as a Talent Incubator: An Extraordinary Experiment.

• Author: Rescher, Nicholas
• Position: RAND Corporation - Organization overview

During World War II, the armed services of the United States had benefited from an ample opportunity to use the great pool of scientific expertise available to them for die systemic study of their operations in matters of equipment, supply, and the conduct of warfare. The senior commanders appreciated the value of this resource, and with the postwar creation of the U.S. Air Force as an independent branch of service, its leadership around Henry "Hap" Arnold wanted to retain such a resource. But senior scientists were eager to resume their professional careers, and it became clear that something new had to be created from the ground up and, for stability, to be based in the civilian rather than military sphere. This realization resulted in the establishment of the RAND Corporation in 1948. (1) Most descriptions of RAND's past consider it from the vantage point of what the organization subsequently became. However, my only concern here is with what it was during the first decade of its existence, from 1948 to 1958. (2) This early history reveals BAND as a unique and extraordinarily successful (if accidental) experiment in the incubation of achievement--an unusual example of the effective development and fostering of scientific productivity. (3)

Although the broad outlines of RAND's history are well known, what is little understood and less appreciated is that it constituted a unique experiment in the cultivation of talent carried out with astounding success in the earliest phase of this corporation's existence. RAND's initial modus operandi was able to create an ethos within whose scope very smart people were given the opportunity and the motivation for success in achieving challenging, important, and influential work. Its story provides a vivid object lesson in the effective incubation of talent. An organization whose initial decade yielded four Nobel Prize winners, five assistant secretaries in the Department of Defense, a laureate of the National Medal of Science, the founder of a major research institute, the world's first professor of futuristics, a president of the University of California, and two awardees of the Presidential Medal of Freedom must be doing something right.

The people initially charged with building up RAND were senior executives in the aerospace industry. By some mysterious process, they had acquired a deep respect for scientific talent and a high confidence in the creativity of youth. And, in the event, they recruited an array of promising young scientists and scholars almost wholly in the twenty-five- to thirty-five-year age cohort, who, being junior, were also of course less expensive.

RAND's early hires included not only the standard range of talent in physics, engineering, economics, and mathematics but also social scientists and (surprisingly!) several logicians. Remarkably, it proved to be from the latter groups that some of RAND's most influential contributors were to emerge (see Rescher 2005).

And the people recruited to RAND in its early years were in the main youngsters who were at the start of their careers. They were not yet established figures with extensive commitments to the lecture circuit but novices with a reputation to make. These prodigies were left to their own devices, virtually without supervision, subject only to the understanding that their work should have some thread of relevance to the corporation's national security mandate. Only two strings were attached to these young researchers: they had to be able to obtain a security clearance for access to classified material, and they had to work on RAND's Santa Monica premises during standard business hours. Requiring them to work on the premises was a stroke of genius. They had time on their hands, and so, abiding by a policy urging them to keep their office doors open, they looked in on one another for stimulus and opportunities for collaborating on matters of common interests. The volume and degree of cooperative interaction was impressive, and a culture of fertile interaction became endemic. Just this factor, it seems, contained the secret of success.

During this era, RAND thus permitted and indeed encouraged its researchers to "do their own thing" and yet be entrepreneurial within the corporation's agenda. And, overall, during this period roughly one-quarter of RAND's productivity dealt with basic issues in game theory, applied mathematics, computation, applied economics, public policy, and similar topics often related only remotely (if at all) with military matters. (4)

RAND's organizational practice turned the usual pattern of resource allocation upside down. In most research efforts, the questions select the respondents: the problems are set first, and the suitable investigators are found to address them. But RAND's practice reversed this process. The investigators were put in place first, and the selection of problems was left to their individual and collective initiation. And the experience of RAND's first decade shows how laissez-faire entrepreneurship is a promising program not just in matters of economics but also with productivity in the realm of ideas.

RAND's military paymasters of those days cut the organization a great deal of slack. Around one-quarter of the research had little if any immediate bearing on military matters and was aimed at issues of scientific and scholarly value in their own right. RAND's powers-that-be were doubtless fully aware of this divergence and viewed it as part of the unavoidable "overhead" cost of maintaining a first-rate research facility.

To an extent that is astonishing in retrospect, the early RAND's free-wheeling modus operandi provided its talented researchers with unusual freedom from the debilitating pressure of managerial restrictions and top-down regulation of productive activity. And this freedom appears to have motivated and energized those young RANDites far beyond any level of reasonable expectation. The initiative- welcoming ethos of RAND's early management mode created a largely unregulated market for the exchange of ideas and the allocation of efforts that challenged able and dedicated people to...