Mavericks at Work: Why the most original minds in business win. William Taylor
studios. We attended a closed-to-the-public awards ceremony at Radio City Music Hall, where employees of what has to be the world’s most entertaining bank sang, danced, and strutted their stuff. We sat in on a crucial monthly meeting (the 384th such consecutive meeting over the last 32 years) in which top executives and front-line managers of a $600-million employee-owned company share their most sensitive financial information and most valuable market secrets. We walked the corridors of a 120-year-old research facility where a team of change-minded R&D executives is transforming how one of the world’s biggest companies develops new ideas for consumer products. We walked the streets of Manhattan with teams of employees from a hard-charging hedge fund, who were sizing up ideas about stock-market picks.
This book is our report back to you from the front lines of the future—an account of what we saw, what it means for business, and why it matters to your company, your colleagues, and your career. It is not a book of best practices. It is a book of next practices—a set of insights and a collection of case studies that amount to a business plan for the 21st century, a new way to lead, compete, and succeed.
Our basic argument is as straightforward to explain as it is urgent to apply: when it comes to thriving in a hyper-competitive marketplace, “playing it safe” is no longer playing it smart. In an economy defined by overcapacity, oversupply, and utter sensory overload—an economy in which everyone already has more than enough of whatever it is you’re selling—the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for a truly distinctive set of ideas about where your company and industry can and should be going. You can’t do big things as a competitor if you’re content with doing things a little better than the competition.
There’s another well-known bit of philosophy, this one made famous by Hall of Fame basketball coach Pete Carril, that captures the competitive spirit at the heart of this book—and the maverick mindset that guides the companies we visited. During his 29-year tenure, Carril’s Princeton Tigers regularly squared off against (and often beat) teams whose players were bigger, faster, and more physically gifted than his team. “The strong take from the weak,” his coaching mantra went, “but the smart take from the strong.”
This book is devoted to the proposition that in business, as in basketball, the smart can take from the strong—that the best way to outperform the competition is to out-think the competition. Maverick companies aren’t always the largest in their field; maverick entrepreneurs don’t always make the cover of the business magazines. But mavericks do the work that matters most—the work of originality, creativity, and experimentation.
Who are these mavericks? The core ideas in this book are rooted in the strategies, practices, and leadership styles of 32 organizations with vastly different histories, cultures, and business models. Half of them are publicly traded companies or business units inside public companies. The other half are divided among privately held companies, venture- backed startups, even not-for-profits. Some of them are giants, with thousands of employees and billions of dollars of sales. Some of them are pipsqueaks, with a few hundred employees and sales in the tens of millions of dollars. But all of them are business originals, based on the distinctiveness of their ideas and the power of their practices. They are rethinking competition, reinventing innovation, reconnecting with customers, and redesigning work. In short, they are creating a maverick agenda for business—an agenda from which every business can learn.
Taken together, these companies demonstrate that you can build winning organizations around high ideals and fierce competitive ambitions, that the most powerful way to create economic value is to embrace a set of values that go beyond just amassing power, and that business, at its best, is too exciting, too important, and too much fun to be left to the dead hand of business as usual.
Here’s one small example of the death of business as usual—an example we encountered after the first edition of Mavericks was published. Earlier this year, Dave Balter, founder and CEO of a Boston-based company called BzzAgent, decided that his fast-growing firm was ready to enter the UK. BzzAgent (pronounced “Buzz Agent”) is a pioneer in the field of word-of-mouth marketing. It recruits volunteers (312,000 at last count) to sample products, share their opinions with friends and neighbors, and report back to the company. BzzAgent has been a phenomenon in the United States, with high-profile press coverage, generous venture-capital funding, and lots of blue-chip clients.
But its first big step into London was a misstep. Balter hired a UK executive to run the operation, and it was a clash of cultures from the outset. Balter and his US colleagues are passionate, high energy, messianic. Their new British colleague was cautious and laid-back. After 60 days, by mutual agreement, BzzAgent and its first-ever British hire parted ways.
This hiring miscue is hardly unusual; companies often stumble when they enter new markets. What is unusual is that BzzAgent shared this episode with anyone who was interested—employees, investors, clients, volunteer agents, the media—through its company blog, called the BeeLog. Balter wrote a long entry that described his travels to the UK, his decision to hire this executive, and why things didn’t work out. “We failed,” he concluded. “But we failed fast.”
This is a small taste of the new world of radical transparency. It’s one thing to read essays by pundits about how the Internet eliminates secrecy in business. It’s quite another to encounter a company like BzzAgent that has chosen to throw itself open to outsiders, share its inner workings, and let the chips fall where they may. “Our business is built around the power of people sharing their honest opinions,” Balter says. “We decided to show the world that we could work the same way.”
To be sure, the BeeLog has its share of cute stories about office pranks and new hires. But there’s some pretty edgy stuff as well. For example, BzzAgent, like lots of companies, has an advisory board of gurus who (in theory at least) take an interest in its strategy and operations. Indeed, every quarter, the company prepares a confidential report for its board of directors, and then sends the report to its advisory board as well.
Balter always wondered whether these advisors paid much attention to the briefings. So one quarter he slipped a phony slide into the middle of the report. The slide suggested that members of the advisory board were each about to be sued for millions of dollars. Only three of the company’s 15 advisors responded to the report—a sure sign they weren’t reading it.
Balter posted an entry about his experiment on the BeeLog (complete with the phony slide) and invited visitors to share their advice about what he should do about his disengaged advisors.
Why is Balter willing to be so open about how his company works? For one thing, it’s a matter of authenticity. People want to do business with companies that share their values, and one way to demonstrate your values is to lift the veil of secrecy around your operations. “Openness is in our life blood,” he says.
It’s also a matter of connection. Business is no longer just about transactions, it’s about relationships—real bonds between companies and their customers. What better way to strengthen a relationship than to be honest about your shortcomings?
Finally, it’s about learning—getting smarter faster. Indeed, when Balter phoned us back to do our interview, he was at lunch in London with the new head of his UK office. This executive had read his post about the hiring miscue, and was clear about why he was a better fit. Today, BzzAgent’s UK business is booming, with 26,000 volunteer agents and a long list of clients.
“It may seem scary to share your problems with the outside world,” Balter says, “but it’s also the best way to solve them. You get to the root of the issues so much quicker.”
We can’t promise that Dave Balter’s maverick company—or any of the companies you meet in these pages for that matter—will thrive, without setbacks or reversals, for years to come. (The realities of competition are too treacherous for that.) We can’t promise that every technique or business practice we highlight will work as well in your organization as it does in the organizations we describe. (There’s a difference between learning from someone else’s ideas and applying them effectively somewhere else.)
What we can promise is that we’ve written a book that is as eye-opening, as energetic, as