Hunting for "Bears" with a Maverick

By John Raley

Several years ago, I was talking with some people about what it was like to work with a Maverick.  The answer I received was in the form of a story.  At first I found the story to be, well, quite humorous.  However, the more I thought about the story, the more I realized just how replete and rich it was with insights about Mavericks, about the people who work with them, and about organizations that hope to have successful Mavericks in their midst.

The story says working for a maverick is like going bear hunting.  Your group, including a maverick named Charlie, arrives at the hunting cabin in the evening.  After unpacking, everyone turns in for a good night’s sleep.  The next morning you awake and discover that Charlie the maverick is gone.

A quick search confirms that Charlie is not in or around the cabin.  About that time you hear Charlie’s voice, coming from the woods, yelling “Open the door, open the door!”  Looking outside, you see Charlie running down the path toward the cabin with a bear in hot pursuit.  “Open the door, open the door,” Charlie continues to yell.

“Oh my God,” everyone gasps.  “We have to open the door so that Charlie can get into the safety of the cabin.  If he has to slow down to open the door, the bear will surely catch him just outside the door.”  So you open the door and yell at Charlie to run faster.

Just as Charlie gets to the door, with the bear nipping at his heels, Charlie quickly steps aside.  The bear unable to stop, hurls into the cabin.  Charlie quickly slams the door and then heads back up the trail yelling, “You take care of that one.  I’ll go get another!”

That is what it is like to work with a Maverick.

Everyone in the story had the same purpose – going bear hunting.  However, there were different expectations of how the bear hunting would proceed.  The metaphors in the story say a lot about mavericks, about working with mavericks, and about what organizations can expect from mavericks.

The Bear represents new ideas.  All organizations want new ideas to improve their products, their people, and their competitive advantage.  Management is always interested in bringing new ideas into the organization.

The Group represents the people working with a maverick.  These people need to stay on their toes because they never know exactly what the maverick is going to be bringing through the door, or exactly when this will occur.  People working with a maverick need a broad spectrum of skills and need to keep their skills sharp because the form the new idea has when it enters the organization may not be what would normally be expected.  And, perhaps most importantly, people working with a maverick need to be comfortable with surprises and capable of handling them.

Charlie represents the Maverick.  The maverick sees his or her job as one of going out into the wilderness and bringing new ideas back to the organization.  Once the maverick has brought the new idea back to the organization (i.e., the bear is in the cabin), he sees his part of the job as done and goes off in search of the next idea.

People in the organization, unless they understand mavericks, will feel that the maverick has left things undone, did not maintain ownership of the idea through to completion, and left a mess for them to clean up.

The Cabin represents the Organization.  An organization is typically designed and operated with the expectation that things will happen in a certain way.  However, a maverick within an organization will often have things happening in a quite different way.  As picture in the story, having a bear loose in the cabin runs the risk of tearing up the cabin a bit.  However, the benefit is that the maverick is off hunting again and more bears can be caught sooner rather than later.

The same can be said of organizations who hope to have successful mavericks in their midst.  The organization must be flexible enough to accommodate having things “torn up a bit” knowing that, in the long run, they will have a more rapid influx of useful new ideas.  However, key to that success is also having a group of people within the organization that can take raw ideas and transform them into things that are of value to the organization.

Going hunting for bears with a maverick can be an exciting and profitable path for innovation within an organization.  However, be prepared.  Make sure that you are ready for surprises, you have a team that can handle them, and you have a structure that can survive some turmoil!

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in September 1999. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.    

Editor's Note: The Maverick Way: Profiting from the Power of the Corporate Misfit was published as a book in 2000. If you would like a signed copy of the book by author Lanny Vincent, please call 415-387-1270 or you may purchase a copy at Amazon.com: 

The Maverick Way

This year’s Mavericks Roundtable clarified some key elements of the Maverick Way – a set of conditions and processes that enable corporate innovation and renewal.  So we thought it timely to express our best current thinking about the Maverick Way.

The Maverick Way has four essential elements which appear to increase the probability of success for corporate innovation efforts.  These elements include:

·      an acute awareness of the external and internal conditions that shape the need for an innovation;

·      frequent boundary crossings within and between organizations and fields of specialization;

·      constant mental “movement” of mavericks having a catalytic effect with collaborators; and

·      mentors who know how to spot and protect mavericks and find a home for the resulting innovation in the organization.

Each factor alone is insufficient for successful innovation.  In combination, however, these four factors significantly increase the chances for our innovation efforts to exceed the expectations of the organizations that sponsor them.

Awareness of Conditions

Innovation efforts do not occur in a vacuum.  The need to innovate and the nature of the particular innovation called for – be it in product, process, marketing or strategy – is shaped by external industry and competitive conditions.  It is also shaped by the structure and culture of the “host” organization.

Many years ago at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Bill Wilson correlated the type of required innovation to the life-cycle stage of the industry and/or company.  In his book, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation, James Utterback puts forth the elegant concept of “dominant design” to describe how product and process innovation evolves and shifts, and subsequently shapes the particular industry in which it occurs.  And recently, at the Mavericks Roundtable, many participants were convinced that the host organization’s type of organizational structure shapes the character or the innovation itself.

Organizations have strong predilections to survive.  Frequently that very survival requires a change that appears to threaten the existing organizational structure.  In some cases, if these organizations are to survive they must change; even change their very structure itself.  Cisco Systems seems to be a successful model as it appears to successfully seek out, invest in, integrate and ultimately allow itself to be changed by its acquisitions.

Boundaries Are Crossed

Innovation derives in part from what happens when boundaries (either geographical, technological, organizational or conceptual boundaries) are exposed and crossed and something new is discovered in the crossing.  This is what is meant by “out of the box” or “breakthrough” innovation.  Research by Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap, authors of the book, When Sparks Fly, indicates that the more successful managers of creative groups emphasize the need for group members who are willing to “blur the boundaries” – those who are not territorial about their specialized knowledge and are not afraid to venture onto the intellectual turf of others.

At the 1998 Mavericks Roundtable, we discussed the notion of the corporate “free range,” a metaphor for the range of ideas, people and knowledge that exists free of the host organization’s operating boundaries (corporate “pasture”).  Boundaries help organizations maintain operating control and produce returns for investors.  However, these same boundaries can limit the organization’s growth.  New growth frequently comes from mixing the new from the free range with the “conventional” within established corporate boundaries.  Mavericks are particularly adept at these border crossings.

Mavericks Move

Mavericks, as the historical roots of the word suggests, not only prefer to maintain their “unbrandedness,” they tend to move and morph, changing places and even identities in order to avoid anything that would inhibit their freedom.  Like the interest many managers have in accumulating organizational power, mavericks display a similar passion for pursuing organizational and intellectual freedom.  This is one of the fundamental motivators that makes mavericks appear to be misfits in organizations, and one reason many organizations unwittingly let their mavericks go.

Many mavericks don’t appreciate being labeled a maverick.  Such a “branding” may inhibit their freedom to pursue whatever is required or needs to be pursued.  It is much easier to cross borders when you are anonymous.  However, remaining unbranded in an organization is not something a maverick can easily do alone.

Mentors Protect

Mentors or managers of mavericks are the silent partners of mavericks.  These mentors may be as, if not more, important to the organization’s future as mavericks themselves.  This is one of the insights that came from this year’s Mavericks Roundtable.

The story of the inventor Stienmetz and his manager at General Electric is a classic case in point.  Many years ago GE instituted a no smoking policy for the labs.  Shortly after the policy was announced, Stienmetz’s manager passed by the office of this prolific, pipe-smoking inventor and saw him packing up his things and cleaning off his desk.  Shocked, the manager stopped and asked what was going on, to which the inventor replied, “No smoke, no Stienmetz.”

The manager went home that night completely distraught over the possibility of losing one of GE’s most prized and productive minds.  It didn’t take the manager long to do a little inventing of his own.  The next day Stienmetz was back at work, smoking his pipe.  Everything else was the same, of course, except for the sign on Stienmetz’s office door which read: “Smoking Lounge.”

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This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in November 1999. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.    

Editor's Note: The Maverick Way: Profiting from the Power of the Corporate Misfit was published as a book in 2000. If you would like a signed copy of the book by author Lanny Vincent, please call 415-387-1270 or you may purchase a copy at Amazon.com: 

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0966822617/qid=1124312749/sr=11/ref=sr_1_1/002-3185445-0548811?v=glance&s=books

The Free Range: A Well-Spring for Corporate Renewal

By Jane Gannon

While much of the territory once referred to as “free range” has long since been purchased, plowed or otherwise domesticated, another free range may be coming into view. This free range is about intellectual more than geographic territories. It is where ideas mix with theories, facts and the creative, inventive spirit. It is the place where new trends are born and old proclivities are transformed. It is a place where the boundaries that are crossed are more perceptual than geographic or political. It is a vast and rich territory that surrounds most every corporation, yet it remains unexplored and often ignored by many.

Few have experienced the potential that resides in these spaces. Fewer still have actually spent their careers mining this place for the seeds of innovation and corporate renewal. 

In mid-October, a group of veteran free range riders convened for a Mavericks Workshop in Tiburon, California. Experiences from multiple crossings of the invisible but distinct boundaries that exist between corporate “pastures” and the corporate free range were shared. Of great interest to this group was the role and contributions of the maverick in corporate innovation and renewal. 

Dick Cheverton, a top editor at the Orange County Register, who is writing the soon-to-be published book, The Maverick Way, kicked off the workshop by describing mavericks as those who straddle both the pastures of corporate life and the relatively vast, rule-less, and yet-to-be domesticated free spaces, which are rich with potential for corporate growth and innovation.

By being “unbranded,” the maverick moves freely within an organization, cuts across lines of power, brings people and ideas together, bends the rules and subverts authority. The maverick also moves freely outside the corporation, probing and exploring areas and developing relationships whose relevance to the corporation may not be readily evident, but frequently leads to significant innovations. Mavericks are motivated more by their love of freedom to pursue their interests. Mavericks use the corporation in which they work as a place to pursue this freedom, despite the corporation’s own ambivalence towards them.

While the workshop was titled, “Protecting Mavericks,” it became readily apparent that many of those gathered did not need or want protecting. Many did concede, however, that early in their maverick careers they did have “protectors.”

Bill Wilson, the retired Vice President of Innovation Management at Kimberly-Clark Corporation, who, as a master maverick, is the inspiration for The Maverick Way, suggested that the maverick poses a unique management challenge. By their nature, mavericks operate on the free range, between the confines of corporate boundaries and the wilderness of potential entrepreneurial opportunity. Working with mavericks requires different skills and philosophy.

Wilson defined a maverick as one who:

• thinks and acts in an unpredictable manner that results in innovative ways of living;

• doesn’t take no for an answer;

• doesn’t ask, and doesn’t tell;

• knows the network, the territory and where to go to get help;

• knows that where there is a will there is a way; and

• gets the insight into the product vision.

Leo Shapiro, Chairman of Leo Shapiro & Associates, who is a master trend spotter and analyst, described the various stages a maverick goes through as scapegoat, prophet and trailblazer. Despite being considered out of the mainstream, mavericks are in part defined by the “company they keep,” which is rarely limited to one company, field or area of expertise. Mavericks tend to operate as a member of a group that exists in his or her own mind rather than only as a member of the group of persons who are physically present.

Shapiro views the challenge of mavericks is to tell the corporation what it doesn’t want to hear. Successful mavericks have learned how to do that and not get terminated. As a result, mavericks are prey more often than predators, and have learned to be very aware and quick to react.

The workshop provided a chance for corporate mavericks to meet, share stories and ideas, and network with one another, an opportunity which all of the participants found valuable.

To keep this conversation and network of Mavericks forging ahead on the free range, we are promoting further discussion. Please call us if you would like more information on mavericks, the workshop, the book, or the Maverick Roundtable.

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in November 1998. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.