The creative power of misfits

people who lack power or status: Elizabeth W. Morrison, “Employee Voice Behavior: Integration and Directions for Future Research,” Academy of Management Annals 5 (2011): 373– 412; Charlan Jeanne Nemeth, In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business (New

The leaders of my department understood that to create a fertile laboratory, they had to assemble different kinds of thinkers and then encourage their autonomy. They had to offer feedback when needed but also had to be willing to stand back and give us room.

we decided to focus on seven that have had enduring impact. They are the Walt Disney studio, which invented the animated feature film in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the Great Groups at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Apple, which first made computers easy to use and accessible to nonexperts; the 1992 Clinton campaign, wh

instead of having everyone working on the same feature, the group would break up into project teams and work on several films simultaneously. The latter decision was a particularly shrewd one. Disney has no competition, really, so how does it achieve that sense, so typical of Great Groups, of being a winning underdog? According to Peter Schneider,

Individual Actions: A. Generating and Recognizing Original Ideas 1. Question the default. Instead of taking the status quo for granted, ask why it exists in the first place. When you remember that rules and systems were created by people, it becomes clear that they’re not set in stone—and you begin to consider how they can be improved.