In praise of misfits

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity from Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs. By Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips. Simon & Schuster; 286 pages; $26.

WELL-RUN organisations prize discipline, moderation and obedience. But that legacy of the industrial revolution provides thin soil for innovation. So this lively and insightful book by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips praises the sort of immoderate behaviour that usually blights career prospects, rather than boosting them.

Their central message is that misfits make the best innovators because frustration with the status quo spurs their desire to change it. Rather than money, the real motivators are personality quirks: idealism, ambition, curiosity and stubbornness. The authors illustrate their point with a series of mostly successful vignettes, ranging from a consultant at Accenture who persuaded his employer to set up a non-profit development business inside the company, to rather more startling examples involving Somali pirates, French feminists in fake beards and a man trying to make camel milk a mass-market product in America (parents of autistic children are keen customers).

At the risk of gimmickry, they try to label the features of productive misfittery. The first is hustling—the restless energy that creates something out of nothing through tenacity and resourcefulness. Making your own luck, in other words. The authors give it a rather grandiloquent name: the desire “to force destiny, to create serendipity”.

Self-help books have praised that for decades. But the next item on the list, copying, is more controversial. Though the authors studiously (and repetitively) say they do not endorse the theft of intellectual property, their sympathies are clearly with those who mix counterfeiting with innovation. Owners tend to have overly fixed ideas about how their property should be used, they argue. Outsiders, on the other hand, may have more innovative ones.

Hackers and pranksters get a good write-up too. Obsessive interest in a system, coupled with disrespect for its rules, can be the wellspring of ideas about how to improve it. Provoke rulemakers and others may be inspired about the things that matter more. Vitally, misfits need to be able to pivot. If one thing does not work, start something else. Reinvent yourself, and you will be able to invent other things too. Finally, create a supportive entourage. With only the right kind of misfits, of course.