In a nutshell I don’t think Genius can or should be managed. At best it can be directed (Hey Picasso, what about yellow?) The Agile “game” is not for Alan Kay and his ilk.

At LimeWire we have Agile for engineering and the “Pony Farm” for R&D (Picasso, Alan, et al.) On the Pony Farm you prototype ideas, release them to the wild, and see which ponies come back. Eventually the awesome ponies are tamed and implemented into LimeWire.

Creative success is taking what’s available and rising above that. The “that” doesn’t matter, you’ll only be credited with success if you go beyond it. Maybe Picasso had good canvas but he had to transcend an entire way of painting, that’s what made him great, not the physical painting itself. Otherwise we wouldn’t be buying prints.

This points to another problem, though: if Picasso was looking to “transcend an entire way of painting”, he wouldn’t be interested in most programming work, which is the equivalent of working on murals on behest of someone else’s vision. That’s the right vision, because there’s nothing left to do in painting, right? I wonder if Picasso could have explained his intentions convincingly enough to work at the painters’ equivalent of a research lab…

But more importantly, from the managers’ perspective, for each Picasso, how many bullshitters are there who will waste R&D efforts spinning their wheels? How do you tell the two apart?

Can they tell themselves apart?

From Picasso’s perspective, if he, by some coincidence ended up being the crazy uncle who couldn’t stop drawing pictures, was he really crazy, or just unlucky? Alan Kay has been fantasizing about the dynabook since the 60′s, the OLPC self-ploded, and it took a lot more than fantasizing to implement it as an iPad.

And either way, how good would an iPad be without Apple’s “revolutionary” brand, impeccable taste, and brilliant marketing? “Software as a service” – also around around since the 60′s, but it took Google’s accidental ad goldmine to get the people who understood it the resources to make it possible just at the right time.

All that aside, investing in people over ideas (and certainly over process) certainly seems wise. Being agile (the word, not the process) means understanding what people want, what they need, giving it to them, and expecting results (even if those results don’t end up having market potential).