The administrators studied those ten scientists, hunting for the common thread. Did the supercreatives share the same specialty? The same educational background? The same family background? After considering and discarding dozens of possible ties, they discovered a connection—and it didn’t have to do with who the supercreatives were. It had to do with a habit that they shared: the habit of regularly eating lunch in the Bell Labs cafeteria with a quiet Swedish engineer named Harry Nyquist.
