Customer Reviews

The Deviant's Advantage: How to Use Fringe Ideas to Create Mass Markets

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Mathews and Wacker explain that, by definition, "deviant" and "deviance" refer to "someone or something operating in a defined measure away from the norm....[therefore] everything that is different is deviant." They go on to observe that positive deviance can be a "force for transformation" whereas negative deviance can be a "source of unspeakable evil." In the context of this volume, deviance "irrigates the imagination; offers an inexhaustible font of new ideas, products, and services; and in the end, is the source of all innovation, new market creation, and, for business, ultimately represents the basis of all incremental profit. Deviance equals innovation and innovation equals opportunity. Opportunity creates markets that in turn are destroyed by deviance." Mathews and Wacker assert that deviance follows a linear pattern: Fringe > Edge > Realm of the Cool > Next Big Thing > Social Convention > Cliché > Icon or Archetype or Oblivion.

In other words, what began "operating in a defined measure away from the norm" eventually becomes the norm and thus vulnerable to something else "operating in a defined measure away from the norm" which eventually....You get the idea. Mathews and Wacker describe the voice, spirit, or incarnation of deviance with a neologism, the devox. Used as a metaphor, the devox illustrates that "things have changed -- and continue to change -- at such a rate that conventional language is no longer an effective tool for describing what's going on around around us." Nor can then conventional language describe what has yet to occur. "Remember the first rule of the devox: Nothing's more foolish than conventional wisdom."

Of the ten themes which Mathews and Wacker examine (see pages 10-12), for me the most powerful is what they characterize as "the Abolition of Context" which occurs when Social Convention has eroded to the point at which it loses its authority to define reality for the society it theoretically describes. As context is abolished, the challenge is to build a new culture "and this demands a whole new set of plans and equipment. We need new language to communicate what we're about. We need to get beyond the wisdom of the ages and learn how to embrace the wisdom of the moment. We need to toss out the standards and design new standards." In this context, Mathews and Wacker do not limit their attention to the business world; rather, to the entire global culture within which business is conducted throughout the world. They insist that "real diversity" is all about ideas, perspectives, and sometimes good old fashioned weirdness, not race, age or gender." Deviance will abolish context with or without our permission. "The endgame is that there is no endgame. The goal is permanent transformation, not one-time self-definition."

Mathews and Wacker conclude their book with a brief but insightful analysis of what they call "the public faces of deviance": the Trickster, the Clown, the Wizard or Magician, the Shaman, the Seer, Mystics, Visionaries, the Saboteur, the Provocateur, the Monk, the Hermit, and the Mendicant. "We saved the best deviant for last": the Fool who combines elements of the Clown, the Provocateur, the Saboteur, the Magician, and the Trickster. For those who have not as yet read the book, I realize that these are merely names of creatures who, in an entirely different context, would perhaps torment Batman and Robin. In fact, as Mathews and Wacker carefully explain in the final chapter, they are change agents who -- together -- can help us to initiate and then sustain "permanent transformation." How? Please allow Mathews and Wacker the opportunity to respond to that critically important question.

For many readers, I think this may well be the most thought-provoking book they have read in many years and that may remain true for years to come. Were a higher rating available, I would give it.

I haven't even finished the book and i can't disagree more with the reviews people have written here. My question is, should it really have been marketed as a "business" book. I would classify it as a book worthy required reading for an American Studies course. It fits in with the idea of "the other", people who had "deviant" ideas and thru their actions propelled society to move ahead. These deviances then become the so called "norm". They move society/culture whether it be "pop culture" or products. Hmmm? does America have "culture" other than "pop culture" which is so tied in with consumerism. I think this book is more for the creative thinkers/artists etc. than for business people or people who want to "cash in" on an idea. This book is for people who as kids did NOT color within the lines. I found out about the book thru a radio show interview that was so interesting. This is the type of book that you don't read in one sitting. It is not a "get rich" quick book. duh!!! This is a book where you can read one concept/idea they have pushed forth and you put the book down and "THINK" about it. I think it is brilliant.

I read the three reviews on this book and they are all correct to some extent. It is a refreshing book but presented without a clear thread to their proposition; it does formalise how new ideas move from the cult fringe to mainstream everyday but does not provide a model of how this can be used; it does provide "outside the square" thinkers with a purposeful justification of their right to want to implement new ideas, but it does leave a lot of insights short of the "so what" end point.

If you are someone who likes working in the unclear world of the creative ground breaker, this is a book worth having. If you are afraid of losing or quiting your job for an idea, then leave this alone - it is not your cup of tea at all.

The creative will find the layout challenging but will probably ignore the dead ends and enjoy the journey through the ideas and examples. Worth the money if you are the deviant thinker in the team - you know who you are because all the other people are normal and just want to do the job that the boss wants and you want to deliver what the boss (and the customer) really needs.

The Deviant's Advantage is primarily a sociological look at where new ideas and trends come from. The book goes on to make a linkage to how businesses can better monitor and apply the emerging inputs to make existing and new products and services more successful.

The authors are usually speaking about deviants and deviance in the positive sense of "something or someone operating in a defined measure away from the norm." In our quest for the "new" and "authentic," such deviances sometimes attract a wider audience. In the process of attracting that audience, the deviance is "cleaned" up to be acceptable to a broader group of people until a majority find it appealing . . . at least until the novelty wears off or something more "authentic" shows up.

To understand this process, readers will probably benefit from also reading The Tipping Point and The Anatomy of Buzz.

The authors go on to point out why this process operates more rapidly than in the past. They primarily focus on language becoming more ambiguous, science making reality less objective, and the impact of a more visually stimulated culture. The point about language is particularly well done.

Finally, the authors look at how corporations, those models of conformity, can incorporate deviance by becoming aware of it and incorporating more external perspectives. Hire differently, get new stakeholders involved, and use creative brainstorming techniques to look for potentially more valuable core competencies). This last section is filled with examples of the authors' consulting experiences with major corporations. They end up with an entertaining use of social archetypes to discuss how to disseminate ideas (trickster, clown, wizard, shaman, seer, provocateur, fool).

The authors are unusually well read and very into the latest "new, new" thing. As a result, they make many allusions that are constructive and interesting for their case.

The book does, however, (as my 3 star rating suggests) have substantial weaknesses.

First, the prose is often hard to comprehend due to allusions that are incomplete. This is the fourth sentence in the introduction. "Our simple answer is that deviance happened, and our simple bet is that the barbarians haven't even begun to party." To make matters worse, the authors like to add new terms to spice things up (devox -- "the voice, spirit, or incarnation of deviant ideas, products, and individuals"). When these terms are applied, meaning can become obscure. "Deviants seek out other deviants -- this is how 'scenes' are formed and 'scenes' eventually birth markets. The neotribe . . . ."

Second, the authors claim too much for their point. "Innovation -- all innovation, positive and negative -- begins as a deviant idea germinating in the mind of a person dwelling on the Fringe of society." You can translate that into someone who is not an average person with average behavior thought of it first. Does that amaze you? Almost no one is an average person with average behavior. Further, the importance of major innovations (such as electronics, biotechnology, new sources of energy) comes from developing concepts into reality. What difference does it make who thought of these concepts first? If you look at the important, lasting innovations, these were mostly developed within some large organization (Bell Labs for the transistor, major universities for biotechnology, Boeing for modern jet transportation and so on). Yes, the early conceptualization started with a few individuals . . . but until we develop a Borg-like mind that will happen by definition. Most of what the authors are talking about are "trendy" happenings in social situations. Even those trendy new things are often stimulated by major companies (for example, most of those trendy drinks mentioned in the book start out in the market research departments of some liquor company . . . and are then seeded into trendy bars with corporate promotional efforts). In other words, the authors are ascribing behavior to everything that only applies to some things.

Third, the authors also draw unnecessarily on shock value. Early on there is a detailed description of how HBO portrayed the new torture chic (involving intimate parts of the anatomy). How is that a positive deviation?

Fourth, in describing the application to businesses over a third of the material comes across sounding like an ad for their consulting services. That wouldn't be so bad, except that the examples mostly seem to be ones that the companies didn't use very long . . . or never started with. Those examples don't even seem to add credibility to the process.

Fifth, the authors are very interested in businesses creating new business models, usually through focusing on a new core insight into what will reward stakeholders (customers, end users, employees, shareholders, lenders, distributors, partners, etc.). But they make almost no attempt as to how to take the new core insight and apply it into making a new business model for that organization. In other words, the hard part is left out. That is surprising, because the authors describe many continuing business model innovators like Richard Branson, Dell Computer, Red Hat, and Harley-Davidson. Most companies will need a lot more guidance than this book provides for how to apply these lessons.

Ultimately, the book seems flawed more by a lack of editing than anything else. It's almost as though the editors did not have the right knowledge of business and organizations to make the material both comprehensible and relevant.

After you finish this interesting book, I suggest that you think about how you can listen more carefully to what those who are different from you are saying. Who are you ignoring now? How can you start understanding them better? If you do those things, this book will be a winner for you.

Mathews and Wacker have presented a business book that is hard to put down. Inventive and humorous, creative and whimsical; sound business advice and dreams of the future are all presented in a pleasurable reading style that makes you want to continue reading to the end. If the American car companies read more books like this; perhaps we would see more companies restructuring themselves with astounding new products instead of layoffs and revised mission statements.

The Deviant's Advantage-Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker

What I love about this book is that while it makes a strong case for the importance of deviant thinking in the world of business, it simultaneously explains why so little exists there, and how unlikely it is to ever appear in great abundance. It's just not the way most of the people in the corporate world have been conditioned to behave. Despite all the exhortations to "think out of the box", the vast majority of executives are simply out of their element anywhere else but inside one.
However, as the authors deconstruct the emergence of new and valuable ideas, those things destined to become the next "new" thing, they offers many pointers on how to identify these developing trends before they become mainstream. In so doing, they also coin an especially inelegant term for the originators of these ideas, the "devox" is what they call them. But this is a minor blemish on what is otherwise a truly important book. At the end of the day, what the authors argue brilliantly and illustrate repeatedly is that businesses that embrace risk may be far safer than those that avoid it.

I'm not going to go into too much detail but I will say this is a great book if you have young creatives working in your company (mine is advertising) who need to understand that it is their bizarre/unorthodox way of seeing the world that got them where they are.

Is there a better book that tells someone that being crazy equals profits?

In defence of an earlier comment, I don't think anyone should be intimidated by a self-invented word like "devox." Heck the Simpson's book... the one with the big donut had 84 words that forced me to open my dictionary!

Watts Wacker et. al. are the thinking man's Faith Popcorn. Faith will give you a fish but Deviant's Advantage will teach you to fish. (Which, quite often, is what invention and creativity are about.)

I believe that was how the comedian Steven Wright described himself at one time. It seems to be appropriate for Mathews and Wacker as well. They appear to be comfortably ensconced on the fringe.

This isn't your Daddy's business book - this book won't grant you absolution for your business practices or lifestyle. It is a book that will drive you to view your environment differently - provided you allow it to do so. I read it over and over again for 3 - 4 months. It could trigger differnt thoughts every time I read it. For me this was an important book. Just the understanding of the journey that ideas take from the fringe to social convention was helpful (page 18). Having participated in an industry for the last couple decades that is experiencing this transition, much of the book was relevant to my environment. It has been frustrating to watch good ideas and practices emasculated by corporate clones serving their own agendas. Paradoxically Mathews and Wacker provided context, in a book about the abolition of context, for watching ideas migrate. It also helps understand that the ritualistic emasculation is purely a right of passage administed indiscriminately to all who want to move through.

If you are a person who likes to advise others to think outside the box but can't find your own way out - wrong book. If you are willing to get a little introspective and maybe even shift a paradigm or two this book is a great read. Possibly a significant emotional event.

If you are exploring the end of the "Informaton Age" and the existence/arrival of a new age (as yet unnamed) then you will enjoy this book.

I read this book around the same time as I read the following books;

The Dream Society
A Whole New Mind
The World is Flat
Lovemarks
Attention Economy

It wouldn't be the first one I'd read, but it was totally worthwhile because I was exploring and trying to assemble a big picture on how society was evolving and I wanted to gather as many opinions as I could.

This book is a scam. I think that Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker basically sat down and said "let's write a book with a catchy title as quickly as possible and make a lot of money." The book seems to have been written without an outline or any cogent organizing force. It reads like an excel spreadsheet of name dropping. The book begins by proposing that deviancy can be advantageous in business, and then goes about listing individuals or businesses that have some degree of deviancy. Either that or it is the first book written by a computer. Once boxed into this construct, Wacker and Mathews are too weak in critical thinking to have much else interesting to say. What is shocking is that this book was published and nationally distributed. It reminds me of a lengthy undergraduate text where repetition and concept borrowing replaces any effort to say something original. What is most concerning is a fundamental mistake the authors make at the beginning of the book. The set out to let the reader know their bias. Their bias is that their think deviancy can be good. I hate to have to explain it to Mathews and Wacker, but that is the central thesis of the book --- not their bias. A bias can not be your central precept, because that would be circular. By telling us that their bias is the title of their book the authors reveal nothing to us.

In summary, the book moves beyond being bad, to simply being unacceptable, a manuscript that should have been rejected in its first editorial review. ...