Working with smart people

I personally find it so rewarding to work with smart people, especially smarter than me. Doing what Talis currently does, we manipulate some fairly large and rich (>20m) record sets on a regular basis. We have a current challenge to transform the record structure of our (and our customer's) data over the next year or so to address a new global standard for bibliographic metadata - so called MARC21. Over the coffee machine, this week I was chatting with one of our 'smarts' about the 12 days it would take on one machine to do this - he then said he had prototyped the ability to distribute this 'seti @ home' like onto our internal network and run it in parralel in collective idle time. To even think about doing this, you need to be 'paying attention' to what is going on in the wider software/technology world, not just stuck in the bounded niche of any particular domain ... and then be smart enough to join up the dots. Great stuff.