To return to the question that inspired this post, I think most of the reason is that it’s often less clear how to use genius to some specific end. In most lines of business geniuses often don’t work well because teamwork-related factors dominate performance such that a genius often doesn’t add much and can actually make your business weaker by making it dependent on a person (bad for continuity; your shareholders want to keep making money even if one employee leaves). There are, of course, notable exceptions, but they are exceptions that prove the rule (cf. Apple during the times Jobs was with them and not with them).
Applying genius in other places has similar issues, although less so, thus I expect to see more genius in places like academia, R&D, and politics.
I also suspect the reason we work so hard with “physical genius” in the case of professional sports is that there the pressures are great enough to take the risk on genius and make it work as a team. Other places seem to lack the same pressures oddly enough, although I suspect mostly because they are less salient to those who assemble teams. The cases of Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are great counter-examples where someone did recognize the value of making genius work together as a team. But I think most of the time the value of this is not clear or traded off against other things so we don’t take the risks associated with it (remember that most professional sports teams suffer long cycles of poor overall performance and only brief periods of wild success).
To return to the question that inspired this post, I think most of the reason is that it’s often less clear how to use genius to some specific end. In most lines of business geniuses often don’t work well because teamwork-related factors dominate performance such that a genius often doesn’t add much and can actually make your business weaker by making it dependent on a person (bad for continuity; your shareholders want to keep making money even if one employee leaves). There are, of course, notable exceptions, but they are exceptions that prove the rule (cf. Apple during the times Jobs was with them and not with them).
Applying genius in other places has similar issues, although less so, thus I expect to see more genius in places like academia, R&D, and politics.
I also suspect the reason we work so hard with “physical genius” in the case of professional sports is that there the pressures are great enough to take the risk on genius and make it work as a team. Other places seem to lack the same pressures oddly enough, although I suspect mostly because they are less salient to those who assemble teams. The cases of Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are great counter-examples where someone did recognize the value of making genius work together as a team. But I think most of the time the value of this is not clear or traded off against other things so we don’t take the risks associated with it (remember that most professional sports teams suffer long cycles of poor overall performance and only brief periods of wild success).