Not long before his death in 2007, my father told me that he "thought he might have" coined the term information technology. It turns out he was right. In an article titled "Management in the 1980's," published in the November, 1958, issue of the Harvard Business Review, Harold J. Leavitt and his co-author, Thomas L. Whisler, identify a "new technology" that "has begun to take hold in American business, one so new that its significance is still difficult to evaluate." Since this technology "does not yet have a single established name," the article notes, "we shall call it information technology. It is composed of several related parts": "techniques for processing large amounts of information rapidly"; "the application of statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making problems"; and "in the offing, though its applications have not yet emerged very clearly . . . the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs." By the end of his life, my father had adopted a far more skeptical attitude toward the organizations he earned his living trying to understand and improve.

People too often forget that IQ tests haven't been around that long. Indeed, such psychological measures are only about a century old. Early versions appeared in France with the work of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in 1905. However, these tests didn't become associated with genius until the measure moved from the Sorbonne in Paris to Stanford University in Northern California. There Professor Lewis M. Terman had it translated from French into English, and then standardized on sufficient numbers of children, to create what became known as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. The original motive behind these tests was to get a diagnostic to select children at the lower ends of the intelligence scale who might need special education to keep up with the school curriculum. But then Terman got a brilliant idea: Why not study a large sample of children who score at the top end of the scale?