Unlike the lilies of the field, each of us depends on others. We get our food, clothes, dwellings, cars and a thousand other necessities from the hands of other people, in a world-wide orchestration of effort to which we too are expected to contribute. Disrupt that harmony--by war, unrest, economic instability--and people grow hungry, cold, sick and rebellious. That orchestration did not happen by accident. It involves the interplay of thousands of institutions which human society gradually evolved. Some are commercial, concerned with production and trade, supported and motivated by earned profits. Some are voluntary, such as institutions of religion, higher learning and culture, many with their own niche in the marketplace. And some are governmental--schools, police, army, municipal--claiming precedence over all others and setting down laws by which we live. They have evolved gradually--even relatively undisturbed societies such as the US the process took a century or two--and they form the mosaic in which our lives are embedded. Yet institutions consist of people. Their success or failure depend, not just on their rules, organization and acquired expertise, but also on the ability and dedication of the people who comprise them.. Those include managers who set the tone and define the plan, workers who do the actual work, and a wide continuum of in-betweens. By and large, the number of managers is smaller and their rewards more generous. Many books exist on the overall way by which this set-up works, pitfalls it can face, and the feedback links--pay, stock options, coercion, tangible and intangible rewards--meant to encourage each party to do its best. This however is much too big a subject, and its complexity is still largely beyond me. Here, instead, let me just consider science and technology, about which I have some first-hand knowledge. Most work is repetitive and routine, but some is creative--and again, one finds a whole continuum bridging those extremes. Suppose all creative work stopped, or deteriorated until it no longer did its job (which comes to the same thing). For a while that would be hardly noticeable, because producing the necessities of life is largely a routine task. Only some time later it may be noticed that progress is lacking and that the quality of new products, books, films, technology and science is no longer what it used to be. On the long run, of course, wherever our creativity falters we end up buying foreign-designed goods. Our Toyota cars may be built by US workers, but the creative work is done overseas, and profits go there, too. Routine tasks are predictable. They can be specified in detail, can be given a well-defined value in the labor market and can even be contracted out. Industry has turned the management and coordination of such work into a finely-tuned art. Creative work, in art, science and technology, is completely different. For one thing, it is hard to guess where it leads: one needs thorough technical familiarity (especially in science and technology) to tell the feasible from the unlikely, and even then many guesses turn out wrong. The California legislation, seeking to improve its urban environment, passed a law by which a certain fraction of cars sold would be driven by electricity. It hoped industry would rise to the challenge, but even now, years later, it is uncertain how feasible the goal is. The carrot and stick of incentives and laws can speed up feasible developments, but are limited by hard realities. The rising costs and slipping schedules of the space shuttle and more recently of the space station also underscore the risk of trying to legislate innovation. A perceptive manager may distinguish between routine and creative work. But to the worker doing the job, the cut is altogether different: either it is work of necessity, or a labor of love--again, with all those in-betweens. And a direct connection exists: if work is to be creative, it better be a labor of love. Trying to get a creative product out of workers who are in it for the money may turn out to be as fruitful as trying to scratch a diamond with rhinestones. Silicon valley know this well. Its highly competitive products depend on creativity and originality, and it therefore indulges its workers: forget time clock and dress code, work nights if you want, try out new ideas, share stock options--anything to help creativity flow. Its managers keep abreast of technology, often discuss it with workers (and sometimes party with them), arrange assignment switches to those bored with their jobs and run educational workshops. It seems to work. However, where payoff is more distant (and less certain), creativity tends to a solitary effort. Exploring new territory is risky, and the artist or scientist doing so often has to go alone, for if you have a vision, it is often more productive (at least at first) to follow it up yourself instead of trying to get others to share it. Besides, visions often start out sketchy, with big gaps, and you often get a clear idea of where you are going only by the time you are closing in on your goal. When I started "Profile" I had no idea of the essential lucky breaks--the smallness of _v, the slingshot release and the two-group formation. The creative individual, falling in love with a personal vision, risks a great deal. The willingness to take that risk is a powerful deterrent (not always powerful enough!) against lightly undertaking such a task. A scientist submitting an article to a journal knows it might be rejected--so much more reason for exercising care in writing it. Around 1990 the Reviews of Geophysics revised its acceptance policy: instead of choosing among unsolicited submissions, it set up a distinguished panel to invite articles of broad interest. Almost immediately both volume and quality declined (it recovered somewhat as the policy was relaxed). On one hand, panel members may be unaware of all activities in their areas, especially in a field as diverse as geophysics. On the other hand, once an article is commissioned, the author is under less pressure, since it has essentially been accepted, sight unseen. Writing books, in particular, has always been a solitary labor of love. That made the craft of writing romantically attractive--it wasn't something people did for the money, for sure. Writing a book required only minimal support: paper, pen or typewriter (more recently, a word-processor) and time to use them. Of course, it also required a story or a message, an idea to convey and the skills to present it: but these depended on the writer, not on the outside. Writing was, and remains, a cottage industry. Films and TV, visual media with enormously greater potential than the printed page, are quite different. You cannot produce a movie or video by yourself, at home. You need the efforts of many people, of professionals familiar with the medium and its complex tools, and you need a hefty amount of money, all of which usually require the support of some large institution. Such institutions exist, and some of them have done pretty well in the marketplace: but having been set up, they must sustain themselves by continual production, on a regular schedule. They cannot wait for the next bright idea. Sometimes they adapt the fruits of individual creativity--say of a book--but ideas or not, they must keep producing, which is why so many films and TV programs lack the creative sparkle. Their quality is not helped by the high cost of such productions, which encourage the cutting of corners. Much the same happens when individual science expands into institutional "big science." A century ago, most creative science and technology was a labor of love by dedicated individuals. My romantic outlook as physics student visualized graduate students (and their professors) working nights in the lab, or arguing arcane theories in front to a blackboard. It included the heritage of wartime Los Alamos, just as math includes the heritage of Galois, Ramanujan and Paul Erdšs, and aerospace that of the Wrights, Robert Goddard and McReady's Gossamer Condor. Jerome Wiesner, president Kennedy's science adviser, was once asked about the nature of his work. I am no longer sure of his exact words, but in essence he said that his job was to nurture a free-wheeling creative process and see to it that it was not bogged down by excessive supervision. That sort of spirit, unfortunately, is getting rarer in the era of big science-- especially at NASA, the institution covering my own area. Plenty of creativity remains in the agency, especially among astronomers, a long-established community with its own institutions and traditions. But elsewhere it has suffered from heavy-handed supervision, by managers who fail to appreciate the difference between labor of necessity and labor of love, and who treat creative work too much like routine work.
It might not be too late to reverse this trend. But I am not too hopeful.
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Author and Curator: Dr. David P. Stern
Mail to Dr.Stern: audavstern("at" symbol)erols.com .
Last updated 9 June 2002