Wild Talents

    The talents essential to a New Technological Corporation are rare, hard to find, and difficult to identify even in an interview. They are often prone not to repeat even after a stunning success. Charles Fort's term ``Wild Talents'' may be appropriate to the central asset of a New Technological Corporation. Reliably staffing and expanding those positions that create technological leverage is often as frustrating and seemingly impossible a task as seeking the Holy Grail or attempting to find a repeatable and unambiguous demonstration of parapsychology. Yet it is the presence of such talent and the ability to bring the products it develops to market in a timely fashion that secures the future of a company in an information-intensive industry.

There are few prototypes of talent-constrained industries available for study and the parallels one can find are imprecise and often misleading. The business closest in economic ``shape'' to the software company may be, to the surprise and dismay of technologically-adept software developers, the advertising agency. An advertising agency can be viewed as an inverted pyramid with extensive account relations, production, purchasing, research, marketing, and management resources which mediate the interaction between the agency's client base and a small pool of creative talent who generate the concepts that drive the campaigns that the agency, as a whole, creates.

Technologists' disdain for this economic parallel does not erase the fact that the Wild Talent that invents messages such as ``The Pepsi Generation'', ``The Heartbeat of America'', ``The IBM Commitment To Service'', or ``Tools for the Golden Age of Engineering'' creates capital just as surely as the Wild Talent that invents new computer applications or makes existing applications widely accessible at low cost. Both talents create an intangible product: pure information which, once released into the market, yields sales and profits thousands of times greater than the cost of creating the idea which yielded the wealth.