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.  

The Rememberers by Jane Gannon, Associate

The other day as I was pursuing my newly found passion of canning homegrown, vine-ripened tomatoes, I was thinking about my grandmother and how canning fruits and vegetables was part of her summer routine. Not being interested in learning this skill from her when I was a child forced me recently to seek out a friend to teach me how to can. Now as I filled glass jars with plump, juicy tomatoes, I was mindlessly listening to the radio when Katherine Paddack, the clan leader of the Tlingit Tribe of Alaska, started talking about a gathering of her tribe happening here in the Bay Area. 

Paddack spoke of her Tlingit tribe’s history and how they learned to work with the white explorers who came to Alaska rather then become a victim of the white conquest. Due to its harsh geography, white explorers depended on the Tlingit Tribe, and so the tribe itself survived and prospered, and its identity is still in tact. Even though the Tlingit’s lost many members due to diseases brought by white explorers; they did not lose their culture.  

Upon “white contact,” many other Native American tribes lost their leaders and people to disease and genocide. Many tribes were destroyed and lost their stories, their ways of life and their culture because tribes had an oral rather than written history. One of the ways the Tlingit Tribe was able to maintain its identity is through the role and discipline of the rememberers.  

Rememberers are those who hold and pass on the stories of the tribe. They carry the history and traditions and tell them to other members of the tribe orally. As they sit around the circle one of the rememberers will begin telling a story of the tribe. As he or she talks, others listen. If the storyteller gets something wrong in the story, another rememberer in the group will take over telling the story and correct the mistake, to the agreement of all the rememberers present. The first rememberer will then pick up where he or she left off, and continue telling the story. In that way, the members of the tribe all continue to learn the same history, through the collaborative and oral wisdom of the rememberers.  

According to the Journal of American Indian Education, “One of the sacred duties of certain elders of the tribes was the handing down of these histories to their successors. As they repeated them, they impressed upon the hearer the importance of remembering the stories precisely as told, and of telling them again exactly as he had received them, neither adding nor taking away anything.”

The rememberer is an honored person in her tribe like a shaman or healer, she is held in high esteem by others in the tribe. The rememberer is the history. He is the living record of all the stories of the tribe, telling the stories and tales that would be lost forever without them. As a result of the contact, conquest, and settlement of white explorers and pioneers, many tribes lost their rememberers and thus lost their memories and cultural histories. 

Many of you have heard Lanny talk about creating a “knowledge-creation and codification commons,” a human system of sharing what it is we know so as to enable the learning of what we don’t know. This is an essential and possibly the central element in Toyota’s innovation management system. 

We are struck with the how the role of the rememberer in the Tlingit tribe describes and offers a role and discipline for our organizations that may be necessary in building a sustainable innovation system. Rememberers can help us avoid re-learning and, by keeping the history, point us in the direction of where what we are learning may be applied to creating value. 

While I remember my grandmother so well, my memory is now hazy and it seems like such a long time ago those summer days spent in her kitchen. I wish I could see her again. I wonder what story she would tell me?  

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in October 2008. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.