The Deviant's Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets

Rating:
Summary: Skating on the other side of the ice.
Review: I believe that was how the comedian Steven Wright described himself at one time. It seems to be appropriate for Mathews and Wacker as well. They appear to be comfortably ensconced on the fringe.

This isn't your Daddy's business book - this book won't grant you absolution for your business practices or lifestyle. It is a book that will drive you to view your environment differently - provided you allow it to do so. I read it over and over again for 3 - 4 months. It could trigger differnt thoughts every time I read it. For me this was an important book. Just the understanding of the journey that ideas take from the fringe to social convention was helpful (page 18). Having participated in an industry for the last couple decades that is experiencing this transition, much of the book was relevant to my environment. It has been frustrating to watch good ideas and practices emasculated by corporate clones serving their own agendas. Paradoxically Mathews and Wacker provided context, in a book about the abolition of context, for watching ideas migrate. It also helps understand that the ritualistic emasculation is purely a right of passage administed indiscriminately to all who want to move through.

If you are a person who likes to advise others to think outside the box but can't find your own way out - wrong book. If you are willing to get a little introspective and maybe even shift a paradigm or two this book is a great read. Possibly a significant emotional event.

Rating:
Summary: Who is Normal, Who is Not.
Review: I read the three reviews on this book and they are all correct to some extent. It is a refreshing book but presented without a clear thread to their proposition; it does formalise how new ideas move from the cult fringe to mainstream everyday but does not provide a model of how this can be used; it does provide "outside the square" thinkers with a purposeful justification of their right to want to implement new ideas, but it does leave a lot of insights short of the "so what" end point.

If you are someone who likes working in the unclear world of the creative ground breaker, this is a book worth having. If you are afraid of losing or quiting your job for an idea, then leave this alone - it is not your cup of tea at all.

The creative will find the layout challenging but will probably ignore the dead ends and enjoy the journey through the ideas and examples. Worth the money if you are the deviant thinker in the team - you know who you are because all the other people are normal and just want to do the job that the boss wants and you want to deliver what the boss (and the customer) really needs.

Rating:
Summary: Somewhat interesting, but weak thesis and sloppy editing
Review: My goal is to become a professional pundit. So when other "pro-puns" like Watts Wacker (what a name!) write a book, I usually read it. Maybe I can pick up some pundit trick-of-the-trade. Personally, it has more to do with the scraggly beard and the Pundit Uniform (like Bran Ferrin's fishing vest) than with anything you say and do.

This book distracted be because of dozens of factual errors, from people, to products, to ideas. The errors range from small, like getting the name of the Cue:Cat bar-code scanner wrong, to major errors, like stating in several places that the book of "Genesis" starts with "In the beginning was the word". (Of course, this is how the Christian bible begins, and is not in the Jewish book of Genesis/B'reishet.) I tried to contact the authors directly about these errors, but they didn't answer my mail.

Given the poor editing, it makes me wonder about the rest of his conclusions. For example he suggests that Kodak reinvent itself by becoming the world's photo storage solution. It'll be easy for Mr. Wacker and Mr. Mathews to say in a few years---when Kodak gets in further trouble--See! You should have listened to me!

This book was an entertaining read, but really just a rehash of the old-dot-com "Viral Marketing/Let's shake things up" philosophy that died with the dotcoms. I didn't learn anything new about marketing, and the only thing I learned about punditry is I need a cool name like "Watts Wacker" to let people listen to *my* wacky ideas!

Rating:
Summary: From Oddity to Conventional Wisdom to Obscurity
Review: The Deviant's Advantage is primarily a sociological look at where new ideas and trends come from. The book goes on to make a linkage to how businesses can better monitor and apply the emerging inputs to make existing and new products and services more successful.

The authors are usually speaking about deviants and deviance in the positive sense of "something or someone operating in a defined measure away from the norm." In our quest for the "new" and "authentic," such deviances sometimes attract a wider audience. In the process of attracting that audience, the deviance is "cleaned" up to be acceptable to a broader group of people until a majority find it appealing . . . at least until the novelty wears off or something more "authentic" shows up.

To understand this process, readers will probably benefit from also reading The Tipping Point and The Anatomy of Buzz.

The authors go on to point out why this process operates more rapidly than in the past. They primarily focus on language becoming more ambiguous, science making reality less objective, and the impact of a more visually stimulated culture. The point about language is particularly well done.

Finally, the authors look at how corporations, those models of conformity, can incorporate deviance by becoming aware of it and incorporating more external perspectives. Hire differently, get new stakeholders involved, and use creative brainstorming techniques to look for potentially more valuable core competencies). This last section is filled with examples of the authors' consulting experiences with major corporations. They end up with an entertaining use of social archetypes to discuss how to disseminate ideas (trickster, clown, wizard, shaman, seer, provocateur, fool).

The authors are unusually well read and very into the latest "new, new" thing. As a result, they make many allusions that are constructive and interesting for their case.

The book does, however, (as my 3 star rating suggests) have substantial weaknesses.

First, the prose is often hard to comprehend due to allusions that are incomplete. This is the fourth sentence in the introduction. "Our simple answer is that deviance happened, and our simple bet is that the barbarians haven't even begun to party." To make matters worse, the authors like to add new terms to spice things up (devox -- "the voice, spirit, or incarnation of deviant ideas, products, and individuals"). When these terms are applied, meaning can become obscure. "Deviants seek out other deviants -- this is how 'scenes' are formed and 'scenes' eventually birth markets. The neotribe . . . ."

Second, the authors claim too much for their point. "Innovation -- all innovation, positive and negative -- begins as a deviant idea germinating in the mind of a person dwelling on the Fringe of society." You can translate that into someone who is not an average person with average behavior thought of it first. Does that amaze you? Almost no one is an average person with average behavior. Further, the importance of major innovations (such as electronics, biotechnology, new sources of energy) comes from developing concepts into reality. What difference does it make who thought of these concepts first? If you look at the important, lasting innovations, these were mostly developed within some large organization (Bell Labs for the transistor, major universities for biotechnology, Boeing for modern jet transportation and so on). Yes, the early conceptualization started with a few individuals . . . but until we develop a Borg-like mind that will happen by definition. Most of what the authors are talking about are "trendy" happenings in social situations. Even those trendy new things are often stimulated by major companies (for example, most of those trendy drinks mentioned in the book start out in the market research departments of some liquor company . . . and are then seeded into trendy bars with corporate promotional efforts). In other words, the authors are ascribing behavior to everything that only applies to some things.

Third, the authors also draw unnecessarily on shock value. Early on there is a detailed description of how HBO portrayed the new torture chic (involving intimate parts of the anatomy). How is that a positive deviation?

Fourth, in describing the application to businesses over a third of the material comes across sounding like an ad for their consulting services. That wouldn't be so bad, except that the examples mostly seem to be ones that the companies didn't use very long . . . or never started with. Those examples don't even seem to add credibility to the process.

Fifth, the authors are very interested in businesses creating new business models, usually through focusing on a new core insight into what will reward stakeholders (customers, end users, employees, shareholders, lenders, distributors, partners, etc.). But they make almost no attempt as to how to take the new core insight and apply it into making a new business model for that organization. In other words, the hard part is left out. That is surprising, because the authors describe many continuing business model innovators like Richard Branson, Dell Computer, Red Hat, and Harley-Davidson. Most companies will need a lot more guidance than this book provides for how to apply these lessons.

Ultimately, the book seems flawed more by a lack of editing than anything else. It's almost as though the editors did not have the right knowledge of business and organizations to make the material both comprehensible and relevant.

After you finish this interesting book, I suggest that you think about how you can listen more carefully to what those who are different from you are saying. Who are you ignoring now? How can you start understanding them better? If you do those things, this book will be a winner for you.

Rating:
Summary: Embrace Risk
Review: The Deviant's Advantage-Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker

What I love about this book is that while it makes a strong case for the importance of deviant thinking in the world of business, it simultaneously explains why so little exists there, and how unlikely it is to ever appear in great abundance. It's just not the way most of the people in the corporate world have been conditioned to behave. Despite all the exhortations to "think out of the box", the vast majority of executives are simply out of their element anywhere else but inside one.
However, as the authors deconstruct the emergence of new and valuable ideas, those things destined to become the next "new" thing, they offers many pointers on how to identify these developing trends before they become mainstream. In so doing, they also coin an especially inelegant term for the originators of these ideas, the "devox" is what they call them. But this is a minor blemish on what is otherwise a truly important book. At the end of the day, what the authors argue brilliantly and illustrate repeatedly is that businesses that embrace risk may be far safer than those that avoid it.