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).
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