No amount of impassioned rhetoric meant anything on its own.
They might all have been researchers, and research might have demanded idealism, but people still had to eat.
Idealism certainly had its place in research, but it could not put food on the table. The investors, Starry Sky Technology and the Jinling Institute for Advanced Study, were bound to get the meat, but that was no reason to deny everyone else even a sip of broth.
Lu Zhou could not do something like that, nor would he ever do it.
After finishing his speech, Lu Zhou looked at the excited researchers and immediately gave everyone a week off. He also announced that he would have the finance department pay every member of the project team a bonus of at least one hundred thousand yuan, with a further twenty million yuan in bonuses set aside to reward outstanding contributions to the research.
If the first half of his speech had merely left everyone floating on air...
Then the second half, where he announced their rewards, was like a Cloudstorm Bomb detonating in the laboratory. Every inch of air burned with boiling enthusiasm...
Five minutes had passed since they left the laboratory, but Yang Xu's eardrums still ached from the noise.
The researchers had been so excited upon hearing about the twenty-million-yuan bonus that their cheers had made even the windows tremble. Thankfully, the precision instruments were in another laboratory, or those shouts might have destroyed equipment worth millions.
Walking beside Lu Zhou down the corridor, Yang Xu poked a finger into an ear, hesitated for a moment, then asked a question.
"Isn't twenty million a little too much?"
Unless they were working on a major national project or had secured substantial corporate investment, twenty million was about as much funding