Who are the most amazing "misfits" you have encountered in your life?

11 Sep 2010

As I am writing this line, I am sitting at Il Caffee in the creative neighbourhood of Kungsholmen in Stockholm, Sweden, and I am quietly observing the hipsters and bohemians around me. What immediately strikes me is that 6 out of 10 are using Macs (me not included). This would have been unthinkable 10, 5, or even 3 years ago. In fact in 1997, Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy and Steve Jobs (whom I have a professional man-crush on) was asked to come back from Pixar to save the company.

Imagine that you were Steve, and were asked to turn around a company that was your own brainchild and that you had been physically and mentally ostracized from a few years earlier.

At the same time, Michael Dell of Dell Computer fame, was asked what he would do if asked to take over at the helm of Apple. His response: 'I'd kill it off!'. While Dell has sunk into the oblivion of 'mass-customisation' and the herd of non-differentiated PCs, Apple has emerged from the shadows of 'misfit-land' and taken over from Microsoft as the technology company with the largest market capitalisation in the world. Is this the victory of misfits over conformity, or will Apple's emergence create a new norm, which will become the new 'normal' in computing? Time will tell...

The greater point here is that 'outside is the new in'. I don't know about you but I have always felt like a bit of a misfit, not really fitting in anywhere, being blamed and encouraged for heretic thinking, being reprimanded yet hired for unorthodox behaviours, challenging the status quo, yet not quite knowing what will replace it, and despising the maxim that 'if it ain't broken, don't fix it'.

In my next book 'Misfits', I go on a journey to show how misfits are the ones who drive positive change, forward-looking innovation, and solve problems creatively, and that without them your organisation really cannot compete.

My inspiration and code was derived from this 1997 ad campaign for Apple which firmly embedded Apple's value-proposition as an organisational 'misfit'. Look carefully at the words and let them simmer emotionally for you, as you dream of the genius of 'misfits' like Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, and Jim Henson et al. who are featured in this black & white ad.

'Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

'The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.'

What's the point for you?

In organisations, innovation happens at the intersection of thought. Therefore you need to turn up in all your magnificent misfit-ness, and bring your cookie, weird, and wonderful thinking into all situations. Susan Boyle has firmly shown us that being authentic and a little strange is very appealing (she sold 7 times as many record as Rihanna and Lady Gaga on her first week on the US charts).

Ask yourself the following questions:

when did I last conform just because I was playing office politics?
have I recently sat quiet while someone was walking all over my values?
how could I better pitch my innovation ideas so that I generate buy-in in my company, even if they are a bit risque?
how can I better be an acu-pressure point of change and relief in my organisation?
how do I step into my misfit-ness to drive positive change around me?

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