Early RAND as a Talent Incubator

From 1948 to 1958, RAND Corporation, the nonprofit research institute created by the U.S. Air Force, hired scores of exceptional young thinkers who would later go on to win Nobel prizes and other top accolades, launch new fields of study, help run the Pentagon, and start important think tanks of their own. Yet despite this success, few organizations have followed early RAND’s winning recipe of talent acquisition paired with a culture of free-wheeling collaboration.