That restless spirit is what animates the great modern adventure of innovation and entrepreneurship. There is nothing more powerful in business today than a genuinely new idea, and the sense of experimentation that goes along with turning a new idea into a marketplace reality. In an era of hyper-competition and non-stop change, the only sustainable form of market leadership is thought leadership. Ideas matter: the only way to stand out from the crowd is to be a creator and defender of novelty.
This is the message at the heart of our book, Mavericks at Work. In industry after industry, organizations and executives that were once dismissed as upstarts, as outliers, as wildcards, have achieved positions of financial prosperity and market leadership. There’s a reason the young billionaires behind the most celebrated entrepreneurial success in recent memory began their initial public offering (IPO) of shares with a declaration of independence from business as usual. “Google is not a conventional company,” read their Letter from the Founders. “We do not intend to become one.”
Nor does the unconventional cast of characters you will encounter in this book. From a culture-shaping television network with offices in sun-splashed Santa Monica, California, to a little-known office- furniture manufacturer rooted in the frozen tundra of Green Bay, Wisconsin, from glamorous fields such as advertising, fashion, and the Internet, to old-line industries such as construction, mining, and detergent, they are winning big at business—attracting millions of customers, creating thousands of jobs, generating tens of billions of dollars of wealth—by rethinking the logic of how business gets done.
Alan Kay, the celebrated computer scientist, put it memorably some 35 years ago: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” We believe the companies, executives, and entrepreneurs you’ll meet in the pages that follow are inventing a more exciting, more compelling, more rewarding future for business. They have devised provocative and instructive answers to four of the timeless challenges that face organizations of every size and leaders in every field: how you make strategy, how you unleash new ideas, how you connect with customers, how your best people achieve great results.
We’ll be the first to admit that most of the case studies and examples in Mavericks at Work are situated in companies with operations in North America. That’s a reflection of where we are based, and the organizations and leaders we know best. But as we’ve traveled the world spreading our maverick messages, we’ve become convinced that the ideas these case studies illuminate are just as relevant in Birmingham as they are in Boston, Massachusetts, that maverick strategies and practices are just as likely to be hatched in London as they are in San Francisco or Austin, Texas.
Last September, for example, as part of our lecture tour for Mavericks at Work, we spent a day at London’s Tate Modern gallery, not to admire the exhibitions (although we did a bit of that) but to participate in an idea summit organized by WPP, one of the world’s leading marketing- communications groups. The highlight of the day was a talk by Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP’s founder and CEO, and a force to be reckoned with in the realms of marketing, media, and global strategy.
Sir Martin painted a mesmerizing picture of the still-underestimated power of China. The country is producing 465,000 engineers per year, while the US produces 56,000 per year. China Telecom alone has 340 million subscribers, he noted. That’s more than five times the number of customers than there are people in the United Kingdom.
He also emphasized a defining strategic challenge for big companies everywhere. On the one hand, there is vast oversupply of products. From cars to computers, dishwashers to disk drives, there are too many makes, models, and brands chasing too few customers. At the same time, there is a worsening shortage of talent—making it tougher for giant companies, who are getting their brains beaten out in the product market, to find the brainpower they need to win.
But for us, the most striking insight came from Sir Martin’s discussion of the competitive dynamic between his firm—a global marketing powerhouse—and digital powerhouses such as Google. One participant wondered: Are the new Internet giants allies of or rivals to marketing giants such as WPP?
Certainly, Google is a business partner of WPP, he replied. (In fact, WPP is Google’s biggest customer.) But Google also aspires to play a bigger and bigger role in how advertising works, from print to radio to the Web. In other words, the Internet giants are both friends and foes—or “froes,” to use Sir Martin’s phrase. They are both friends and enemies—or “frenemies,” to use his other phrase.
Froes. Frenemies. These simple terms capture a huge transformation in the logic of business competition and organizational performance. Think of the relationship between Apple and the music labels, or between semiconductor companies and personal computer makers, or between Chinese manufacturers and the Western companies they supply.
Each side can’t live without the other—they have to be friends, allies, business partners. Still, each side is intensely wary of the other. The music labels resent Apple’s insistence on how prices should be set for iTunes downloads; Western companies understand full well that even as they avail themselves of China’s low wages in the short term, they are creating a new generation of competitors in the long term.
Indeed, everywhere you look, the dividing lines of business are being erased and redrawn. No wonder there is so much turnover in the executive suite—the dynamics of competition keep getting more complicated. As do the dynamics of life inside organizations. There’s a reason that the TV program The Office has been a runaway hit on both sides of the Atlantic. All of us have experienced the twists and turns of office politics (not to mention the incompetence of many people in positions of authority). But the same dividing lines that are being erased between companies are also being erased within companies. It’s more complicated (and thus more maddening) than it’s ever been to be part of a big organization.
The official “org chart” has less and less to do with how work actually gets done. Life inside companies is an ever-changing mix of projects, teams, and deadlines. Colleagues whom you need to recruit for your big assignment may try to recruit some of your prized team members for their big assignment. It’s nothing personal, it’s just the way things work today. And as writers and thinkers, we understand it now better than we did before, thanks to that fresh insight by Sir Martin and his colleagues at WPP.
We hope that the ideas and insights in our book will have an impact on how you make sense of the world around you. We’ve always believed that the first step in any successful venture—starting a company, launching a product, even writing a book—is to establish a clear definition of what it means to succeed. Our definition of success for this book begins and ends with its impact on you. We will consider Mavericks at Work a success if it opens your eyes, engages your imagination, and encourages you to think bigger and aim higher. Most of all, we will consider it a success if it equips to you act more boldly as a leader and win more decisively as a competitor. We will measure our success by how much we contribute to yours.
That said, this is more than a how-to book. It is also a what-if book. Business needs a breath of fresh air. We aim to restore the promise of business as a force for innovation, satisfaction, and progress. Indeed, despite the many bleak headlines, blood-boiling scandals, and calamitous financial meltdowns over the last five years, the economy has experienced a period of transformation and realignment, a power shift so profound that we’re just beginning to appreciate what it means for the future of business—and for how all of us go about the business of building companies that work and doing work that matters.
To this end, we approached our work in the spirit of the Royal Society. We didn’t take anybody’s word for what was happening in business. We ventured out to see it for ourselves. We immersed ourselves in organizations that have shaped the course of their industries by reshaping the sense of what’s possible among employees, customers, and investors. We spent countless hours with leaders at every level of these organizations, from CEOs to research scientists, who understand that companies with a disruptive point of view in the marketplace also need a distinctive approach to the workplace.
We went deep inside these organizations, looking to understand