Consider the case of the Corning management team that bet the company on fiber optics. The technical guys did their part and invented glass fiber with orders of magnitude better transparency. Suddenly, at least in the lab, you could in theory move light for miles down a glass cable, instead of mere meters, without having to boost it.

The decision to bid for big contracts was a management decision. Management didn’t know for a fact that they could deliver—-further improvements in process would be necessary. If the gamble failed, their careers would be ruined and Corning might go bankrupt. On the other hand, making pots and pans forever was not a winning strategy: Corning had to come up with something big and new if it was going to be any sort of player in the world of tomorrow.

The work of bringing off something big like this is very, very similar to the research work you describe. It’s exhausting, exhilarating, and intense. When it’s done, if it’s done right (and again, very few can do it) the world has fiber optics communications.

The payoff was almost beyond measure. Billions of dollars of copper were freed up from use in telephone lines, just for starters. The benefit to society of getting the job done then, rather than perhaps in the normal course of events, a decade or two later, must be reckoned to be on the order of a trillion. Management received a paltry share of that. The science team, likewise. Corning, ditto. Almost all the benefit was scattered far and wide. We’re using it, just to hold this conversation.

Go back a century and look at the career of Andrew Carnegie. He didn’t invent new steel-making technologies, but he did find a way to bring them to scale rapidly. Steel rails carried food to distant markets. Human nutrition across a continent and more improved. Carnegie got rich, true, but the bulk of the benefits were scattered across the wider society. And what did he do with all that money? Get fat and throw obscene parties, right?

Actually, he gave it away to found libraries in thousands of small towns across America. Many of them still stand.

Now there are many managers who do not fit this heroic mold. But managers do in fact sometimes do very valuable work.