The Deviant's Advantage Paperback - 2004

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Greetings, Fellow Deviants


Mad has become mainstream. Either that or society has sunk to our level.

--John Ficarra, coeditor, Mad magazine

Mad isn't the only deviant to find its way to the center of Social Convention. Turn on your television and you can witness corporate America's commercial embrace of the dark side in living color and Dolby surround sound. A clip from Easy Rider--the 1960s paean to outlaw biking, the counterculture, casual sex, and selling cocaine--is being used to hawk Diners Club and Diet Pepsi. "I Put a Spell on You," a 1954 song by Screamin' Jay Hawkins--the singer once rumored to be a cannibal who, wearing a bone through his nose to complement the ones in his necklace, began his act by rising out of a coffin--is now a jingle pushing Pringles, the most sanitized, processed, standardized incarnation of a potato in history. Push away from the edge a bit further and commercial life starts getting really weird. Former presidential candidate Bob Dole appears in Pepsi ads talking about his "little blue friend," parodying his role as a spokesman for Viagra. If the idea of a senior statesman marketing himself as the poster boy for erectile dysfunction doesn't strike you as quite odd enough, go online (cajohns.com) and you can find CaJohn Fiery Foods of Cleveland, Ohio, a fire extinguisher firm that also markets Vicious Viper, a laboratory-enhanced "hot" sauce that is actually too hot for most people to eat. The weirdness is out there--alive and well--and lots of people are finding ways to make money off it.

Despite the increasingly surly growls of bear marketers, we still live in one of the most economically prosperous periods in history. And the truth--whether we like to admit it or not--is that we owe everything we know, have, and think to the long line of deviants who have come before us.

Most of you reading this book no doubt work for companies founded by a deviant, even (or perhaps especially) if you're self-employed. Some are born to deviance, but everyone can profit from studying how deviance is transforming society and creating market opportunities. Deviance is the backbeat of commerce, the rhythm of innovation that drives wealth creation and defines attitudes and values. Socially, we shun the deviant while remaining addicted to the fruits of their sometimes misguided labors. By their very nature deviants define the essence of social and commercial change, creating new products and markets in their wake. This might explain why today there's such a big market for deviants (we should know, we're part of it), as long as they're not full-time employees.

The Fringe has arrived center stage in everything from extreme sports (skateboarding, snowboarding, mountain biking, and even the ill-fated XFL), to extreme foods (both the title and theme of a popular Food Network cable show), to even, yes, something called extreme pornography (which seems to involve midgets, simultaneous multiple couplings, and the creative use of large lengths of surgical tubing). Extreme media has moved beyond the trailer-trash confines of rampant Jerry Springerism to embrace "reality television" in all its forms, from the media-famous, depixilated naked Richard Hatch of the original Survivor series; to the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll of MTV's Road Rules and Real World; to the sleaziness of Temptation Island, where people compete for the right to debase themselves and others in front of a national audience; to the star-crossed millionaire marriage of Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell. If you're not seeing a pattern here just wait for our next military engagement, complete with bombs whose warheads have been modified to hold cameras so that CNN viewers across the planet can be guaranteed the best seat in the house.

It isn't just society or the media that's a bit out of kilter; mainstream business culture has been equally infected by the deviance bug. We've seen what in a kinder, gentler time might have seemed like strange corporate bedfellows--the short union of Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble, two branding giants unused to seeking alliances; Federal Express and the United States Postal Service, in effect direct competitors; and Boeing and the U.S. Department of Defense, public and private sector--happily rolling together under the covers of capitalism. We've seen McDonald's pick up the mantle of animal rights activists with a vengeance by setting the global standards for laying-hen cages, and Madonna furthering her commercial empire by producing "What It Feels Like for a Girl," a video so violent it was banned as "entertainment" by both MTV and VH1--although both stations and a host of other broadcast media did air it (on a heavily marketed onetime basis) as "news." And let's not forget that once upon a time sports fans saw commercials as necessary evils, while today's post-Super Bowl analysis is more often than not about which ad--not which team--scored a touchdown.

ODD MAN OUT IS IN

Historically, most deviants have been content to express their deviance and go home. They still make their presence known on their own time and in their own voice, but they increasingly refuse to gracefully fade into the cultural wallpaper. We're writing this book at a time when Microsoft, one of America's most prominent corporations, is led by a college dropout (albeit a Harvard dropout); the last U.S. president of the twentieth century opted for hormones over an honored place in history; and music furthering negative racial and sexual stereotyping is all the rage. Business magazines like Fast Company, Business 2.0, and even Entrepreneur fill their pages with stories not of executives who just played the game well, but of those men and women who play the game differently or don't play at all. Instead of breaking the rules they make their own rules. Bill Gates did not see himself as the lucky guy chosen to be IBM's vendor for the operating system when IBM entered the PC market more than twenty years ago. Instead he used IBM as the springboard for building his own empire.

Something is happening in the corporate world and in the world at large that is changing both the timetable of change and every aspect of personal, social, and commercial engagement. Businesses are increasingly being challenged to rethink, redefine, and renew--often along fairly radical lines--or fail. This poses a significant challenge to most CEOs, who, having made their bones dealing with established markets, are being asked to produce constantly improving results in markets that simply don't respond to traditional approaches. The rules have changed while the conventional players are still on the field. In a world seemingly turned topsy-turvy, the odd man out is increasingly calling the shots--not a problem if you can translate the language of deviancy, but one hell of a challenge if you're mired in the quicksand of convention. It's painfully clear that there's more than a touch of madness in most successful methods, but it remains to be seen whether there's much method left in our collective madness. We believe not only that there is, but also that individuals and companies can learn to understand, control, and exploit the principles and lessons deviance has to offer.

Before we refine our hypothesis, we want to take some time to clarify language, beginning with the word deviance, which we suspect has a fairly negative connotation in your mind. As we use it, deviance is the conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary following of any path other than the norm. In our lexicon deviance can have a positive impact, a negative impact, or an impact so marginal it appears to be nonexistent. Historically, deviance has been defined by "normal" people as the distance between themselves and the people, products, services, and ideas they find all but unthinkable. The intentions and/or consequences of deviance are not always obvious. Often deviance is an end in itself. Finally, and most importantly, deviance is the source of all true innovation, growth, and indeed our collective survival. Deviance is defined by time, place, and circumstances. Physical evolution is perhaps the perfect example of deviance in action. Without mutation--essentially deviance from an established DNA pattern--nature would remain static; mankind would still be scrambling about on all fours; and modern agriculture wouldn't exist.

Throughout history the deviant has been the often-unconscious exponent of deviance--the freak, the lunatic, the prophet without honor, the dreamer, the visionary well ahead of his or her time. They have been easily identified by their stark opposition to the standards of their time or their lack of favor with the establishment. Not all deviants are bad, especially in the clarifying light of history. Christ was a deviant, as were Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Pasteur, and Picasso. The first person to challenge the accepted order of things is deviant by definition. Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs are all examples of successful twentieth- and twenty-first-century deviants.

Today, especially in the corporate environment, one can be deviant by choice. The label--formerly something to be avoided at all costs--is, at least in selected circumstances, something of a badge of honor. What used to be pejorative has, in certain circles, become almost laudatory. The Silicon Valley stereotype--sloppily dressed, sending Frisbees across the room, choosing their own hours, and ingesting questionable botanicals in pursuit of out-of-the-box solutions--provides a classic example. Of course, one could argue that the true deviant in Silicon Valley would report to work at exactly 9:00 a.m. in a three-piece Brooks Brothers suit and wing tips, carry a briefcase instead of a backpack, go out for a three-martini lunch exactly at noon, return at 2:45, and leave work at exactly 5:00 p.m.

Popular culture, especially popular language--historically a vehicle for marginalizing Edge players--has been used as a way to convey status and to challenge the center. In the 1960s African American opponents of the war in Vietnam rallied under banners reading "No Vietnamese ever called me nigger." Today young African Americans and their white "wigger" counterparts pay up to $20 a CD to hear a range of rappers and hip-hop artists (black and white) gratuitously use the "N word" in song after song. Street entrepreneur extraordinaire Ice T appears on VH1 with his young son on his lap putting forth proud paternal proclamations like "Yeah, he's a player, a pimp, everything" and shows up on HBO being honored as Pimp of the Year. Yesterday's "cool" and "hip" have been usurped by today's "phat" and "sick."

Despite the meteoric rise (and apparently equally meteoric fall) of computer capitalism, business has been slow to openly acknowledge the power of dancing with deviance. At FirstMatter our professional business is futuring, but our real product is deviance. Businesses, not-for-profits, and even government agencies hire us to behave in ways they assiduously guard against when hiring. The entire coloring-outside-the-lines industry--futuring, innovation, ideation, long-range strategic planning, visioning, teaching creativity, or whatever you want to call it--exists precisely because businesses understand what they lack and need, and because they understand the danger of letting the deviant sleep under the tent too long. Throughout this book we'll explore some of the lessons we've learned along the way, as well as provide examples of what we would do if--perish the thought--somebody actually asked us how to reposition Microsoft, Eastman Kodak, or the Ford Motor Company. But for now we want to share one observation with you: Despite the fact that global businesses spend aggregate billions of dollars every year seeking out the Edge and Edge thinkers, very little of what they find or what they are told ever gets accepted, disseminated, or executed. And that's why Microsoft (when it was still a deviant company) beat IBM at its own game; why Xerox isn't the leader in global computation; why the Swiss lost a huge share of the watch industry to the Japanese; why Jesse Ventura won the Minnesota gubernatorial race; why Harry Potter became a bestseller list almost all by itself; and why a one-store Ben Franklin operator named Sam Walton took over global retailing armed only with a used pickup truck and a dog of questionable genetic origin.

Your father's Oldsmobile succumbed to deviant designs from the SUV to the PT Cruiser in the same way that the traditional view of deviance needs to succumb to a more creative interpretation. We believe--and we'll demonstrate--that changing your view of deviance can allow you to grow on a personal level; help build the success of both brands and corporations; significantly enhance competitive ability; allow companies to organically renew rather than disruptively reengineer; and, finally, provide a blueprint for internal reorganization that yields a host of benefits, from maximizing intellectual property to true knowledge management.

A NEW MODEL FOR EFFECTIVE COMPETITION

In a global economy the table stakes for business are high, whether we're in a bull market or a bear market. The organizations that hire us--and, more significantly, the organizations that would never think of hiring us--are often in desperate need of new analytics to address markets and customers who seemingly are driven by entropic madness. We believe that most, if not all, businesses could benefit from implementing a new framework for viewing and understanding changes in the commercial and socioeconomic processes and that a study of deviance provides a key to this new view and understanding. Along the way we'll also offer some new deviance-inspired language, tools, and metrics to help corporate neodeviants get up to speed; take a look at the development of the Post-Information Age; and give you a new model for effective competition. And we'll take a look at authenticity and how companies can tell faux-Fringe fads from the real-deal exploitable market opportunity. Authenticity is critical because people--deviant or not--hate dealing with phonies. Think of how disappointed those happy hippie Ben & Jerry's lickers must have been when the two biggest proponents of hip capitalism and antiestablishment corporate consciousness sold out to Unilever in April 2000 for $326 million. The paradox of the deviants growing fat at the table of global capitalism wasn't lost on anybody, least of all the company's namesakes. A Ben & Jerry's press release dated April 12, 2000, quoted company cofounders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield saying:

Neither of us could have anticipated, twenty years ago, that a major multinational would some day sign on, enthusiastically, to pursue and expand the social mission that continues to be an essential part of Ben & Jerry's and a driving force behind our many successes. But today Unilever has done just that. While we and others certainly would have preferred to pursue our mission as an independent enterprise, we hope that, as part of Unilever, Ben & Jerry's will continue to expand its role in society.

That same press release also quoted Richard Goldstein, then president of Unilever Foods North America, as saying, "Unilever believes the super premium segment of the ice cream market will continue to grow and that the Ben & Jerry's brand will lead that growth." Unilever chairmen Anthony Burgmans and Niall Fitzgerald also stressed category expansion over social values. The Unilever press release of April 12, 2000, quoted the chairmen echoing Goldstein's sentiments: "We are delighted to welcome Ben & Jerry's into the Unilever family. It takes us into the super premium category for the first time." Score: corporate capitalists 2, deviants 1.307.


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“Where do breakthrough ideas come from? Where do you look to find the next great business concept, the next box-office bonanza, the next Broadway smash, the next social revolution? As this fun, insightful, and brilliant book makes clear, if you want to be ahead of the curve of change, you’ve got to spend time on the fringes of society. The spot-on lesson: Don’t be afraid of deviants—embrace them! They are creating the future before it arrives for the rest of us.” —Alan M. Webber, founding editor, Fast Company

“Leave it to Wacker and Mathews to bring much-deserved honor to deviant thinking and to insert it into the business world. They not only question several fundamental business norms, but they pretty much condemn them to that vast purgatory that exists between breakaway success and spectacular failure—which is precisely where conservative, non-deviant businesses usually end up.” —Scott Bedbury, author of A Brand New World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century and CEO, Brandstream

“In The Deviant’s Advantage, Watts Wacker and Ryan Mathews offer insights and ideas that are truly ‘out of the box.’ But make no mistake—their unorthodox theories connecting the concept of deviance with innovation and creativity ring true for many businesses.”—O. Burtch Drake, president-CEO, American Association of Advertising Agencies

“The Deviant’s Advantage is the best book ever written about how companies can benefit from strange new ideas and the oddballs and misfits who dream them up. Mathews and Wacker write so well that, although I should have been doing other things, I kept turning the pages. They provide compelling stories and arguments about how and why companies can benefit from fringe ideas and people, but at the same time, warn both companies and people of the hazards of embracing deviance.” —Robert I. Sutton, professor, Stanford University, codirector of the Stanford Engineering School Center for Work, Technology and Organization,
and author of Weird Ideas That Work

“Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker will challenge both the right and left sides of your brain. The opportunity to harness genius is all around you but requires dramatic stretching of peripheral vision to bring the fringe into focus. If you haven’t yet made the observation that everything, including time itself, is accelerating, you most certainly will after reading The Deviant’s Advantage. But you’ll also be challenged to examine new dimensions of your potential for personal development by coming to understand that business doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s part of our overall culture. A new breed of leaders is embracing the apparent contradictions of our society and harnessing what seem like emerging aberrant concepts to shape the future.” —Randy J. Rose, president, Energizer Battery, Inc.


From the Hardcover edition.