Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win (Hardcover)

by William C. Taylor (Author), Polly G. Labarre (Author)
Key Phrases: maverick models, crappy people, branch hunt, Extreme Blue, Silicon Valley, Wall Street (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In Mavericks at Work, Fast Company cofounder William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre, a longtime editor at the magazine, give you an inside look at the "most original minds in business" wherever they find them: from Procter & Gamble to Pixar, from gold mines to funky sandwich shops. Want to stop doing business as usual? Then take some lessons from the 32 maverick companies Taylor and LaBarre profile.

Questions for William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre

Amazon.com: Whom do you think this book will appeal to?

Taylor and LaBarre: This book should appeal to a wide "coalition" of business leaders and innovators--impatient, change-minded executives in big companies, senior leaders in smaller, entrepreneurial companies, young people with big dreams about their future and their careers. This book should inform and energize anyone and everyone who wants to do big things in business by shaking up the status quo and challenging the powers-that-be. One important point: We strongly believe that this book should appeal to women as well as men. It is not meant to be an uptight, starched-shirt type read--your typical all-male business book. The book doesn't target women executives per se, but we believe it will appeal to men and women alike.

Amazon.com: What’s the story behind the book?

Taylor and LaBarre: In one sense, Mavericks at Work has been 18 months in the making. That's the amount of time that the two of us spent totally focused on the travel, research, interviewing, and writing to create Mavericks at Work. In another sense, this book reflects more than a decade's worth of learning, thinking, and writing about the best way to do business and the new cast of companies and individual leaders that represent the face of business at its best. First at that classic voice of the business establishment, Harvard Business Review, and then at the new-generation magazine that he cofounded, Fast Company, Bill Taylor has been traveling the world, visiting companies, and interviewing great business leaders. Much the same goes for Polly LaBarre--first at the venerable IndustryWeek magazine, and then as one of the original members of the Fast Company team, Polly has made it her speciality to discover, understand, and chronicle the most exciting and innovative leaders in business.

With respect to Mavericks, the book reflects our in-depth access to the 32 companies featured in the book. This is anything but an "armchair" business book. We logged tens of thousands of miles and spent countless hours visiting, conducting interviews at, and participating in meetings, training sessions, and events inside a wide variety organizations. We went deep inside these organizations, looking to understand the ideas they stand for and the ways they work. We participated in a filmmaking class at one of the world’s most successful movie studios. We attended a closed-to-the-public awards ceremony at Radio City Music Hall, where employees of what has to be the world's most entertaining bank sang, danced, and strutted their stuff. We sat in on a crucial monthly meeting (the 384th such consecutive meeting over the last 32 years) in which top executives and front-line managers of a $600-million employee-owned company share their most sensitive financial information and most valuable market secrets. We walked the corridors of a 120-year-old research facility where a team of change-minded R&D executives is transforming how one of the world's biggest companies develops new ideas for consumer products. We walked the streets of Manhattan with teams of employees from a hard-charging hedge fund, who were sizing up ideas about stock-market picks.

Amazon.com: What makes this book relevant today?

Taylor and LaBarre: We believe that this is the right book at the right time, with a set of messages and a collection of practices that will inspire business executives and entrepreneurs to bring out the best in their companies, their colleagues, and themselves. Why this book now? Because business needs a breath of fresh air. We are, after five long years, coming out of a dark and trying period in our economy and society--an era of slow growth and dashed expectations, of criminal wrongdoing and ethical misconduct at some of the world's best-known companies. But NASDAQ nuttiness already feels like time-capsule fodder, the white-collar perp walk has become as routine as an annual meeting, and the triumphant return of me-first moguls like Donald Trump feels like a bad nostalgia trip, the corporate equivalent of a hair-band reunion. We’ve seen the face of business at its worst, and it hasn't been a pretty sight. This book is intended to persuade readers of the power of business at its best.

Which speaks to one of our major goals for Mavericks at Work--to restore the promise of business as a force for innovation, satisfaction, and progress, rather than as a source of revulsion, remorse, and recrimination. Indeed, despite all the bleak headlines and blood-boiling scandals over the last five years, the economy has experienced a period of transformation and realignment, a power shift so profound that we’re just beginning to appreciate what it means for the future of business—and for how all of us go about the business of building companies that work and doing work that matters.

In industry after industry, organizations and executives that were once dismissed as upstarts, as outliers, as wildcards, have achieved positions of financial prosperity and market leadership. There’s a reason the young billionaires behind the most celebrated entrepreneurial success in recent memory began their initial public offering (IPO) of shares with a declaration of independence from business as usual. "Google is not a conventional company," read their Letter from the Founders. "We do not intend to become one."

Nor does the unconventional cast of characters readers will encounter in this book. From a culture-shaping television network with offices in sun-splashed Santa Monica, California, to a little-known office-furniture manufacturer rooted in the frozen tundra of Green Bay, Wisconsin, from glamorous fields such as advertising, fashion, and the Internet, to old-line industries such as construction, mining, and household products, they are winning big at business--attracting millions of customers, creating thousands of jobs, generating tens of billions of dollars of wealth--by rethinking the logic of how business gets done.

Alan Kay, the celebrated computer scientist, put it memorably some 35 years ago: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." We believe the companies, executives, and entrepreneurs you’ll meet in the pages that follow are inventing a more exciting, more compelling, more rewarding future for business. They have devised provocative and instructive answers to four of the timeless challenges that face organizations of every size and leaders in every field: how you make strategy, how you unleash new ideas, how you connect with customers, how your best people achieve great results.

Amazon.com: Can you give us a brief summary of your book--in 250 words or less?

Taylor and LaBarre: This book is a report from the front lines of the future of business. It is not a book of best practices. It is a book of next practices--a set of insights and a collection of case studies that amount to a business plan for the 21st century, a new way to lead, compete, and succeed.

Our basic argument is as straightforward to explain as it is urgent to apply: When it comes to thriving in a hyper-competitive marketplace, "playing it safe" is no longer playing it smart. In an economy defined by overcapacity, oversupply, and utter sensory overload--an economy in which everyone already has more than enough of whatever it is you’re selling--the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for a truly distinctive set of ideas about where your company and industry can and should be going. You can't do big things as a competitor if you're content with doing things a little better than the competition.

This book is devoted to the proposition that the best way to out-perform the competition is to out-think the competition. Maverick companies aren't always the largest in their field; maverick entrepreneurs don’t always make the cover of the business magazines. But mavericks do the work that matters most--the work of originality, creativity, and experimentation. They demonstrate that you can build companies around high ideals and fierce competitive ambitions, that the most powerful way to create economic value is to embrace a set of values that go beyond just amassing power, and that business, at its best, is too exciting, too important, and too much fun to be left to the dead hand of business as usual.

Who are these mavericks? The core ideas in this book are rooted in the strategies, practices, and leadership styles of 32 organizations with vastly different histories, cultures, and business models. But all of them are business originals, based on the distinctiveness of their ideas and the power of their practices. They are rethinking competition, reinventing innovation, reconnecting with customers, and redesigning work. Together, they are creating a maverick agenda for business--an agenda from which every business can learn.

From Publishers Weekly
A collection of case studies featuring the same formulaic ebullience endemic to business books since blurber Tom Peters' seminal work In Search of Excellence, this reader from FastCompany magazine cofounder Taylor and influential business writer LaBarre profiles some of the more interesting companies doing business today: Cirque de Soleil, Commerce Bank, Pixar, Anthropologie, Southwest Airlines, Jones Soda, Apple Computer and Craigslist among them. Such companies may have disparate cultures, but what unites them is originality, self-knowledge and passion. Whether by remaining small, recruiting zealously, or functioning like a kind of cult, such businesses succeed by imbuing the corporate rank and file with an entrepreneur's vision, avoiding the twin vices of mediocrity and complacency. Conversational but rigorous, Taylor and Labarre's chipper exploration of imagination at work holds value for novice and journeyman business leaders.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (October 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060779616
• ISBN-13: 978-0060779610
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #305,066 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars War of the world-views, December 3, 2006

By	Andrew S. Rogers (Seattle, Washington) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

It's often hard to tell, when reading a book like this one, whether the authors have really hit on an important insight grounded in solid evidence and research, or instead invented a marketable idea and cherry-picked instances and examples that "prove" their point. Although perhaps the passage of time is the only way to tell for sure, I argue "Mavericks at Work" really has seized on something important. That makes this a valuable read, not only for current and wannabe-future business leaders, but for anyone who ... well ... works for a living.

William Taylor and Polly LaBarre argue that the real head-to-head competition in business today isn't process versus process, or even idea versus idea, but rather "values system versus values system." The business leaders who inspire them and who, they argue, are leading the way into the future, are the ones who have rethought the very idea of business, the market, and both internal and external collaboration. A big part of their book applies the model of open-source software and technology-development to the business, and describes how various corporations have harnessed technology and the world's intellectual resources to solve business problems.

But the technological angle is only part of what makes someone a "maverick at work." Another major focus of the book is on companies that have created an energetic and innovative corporate culture that truly inspires employees and delights customers. Herb Kelleher's Southwest Airlines is always the darling of this sort of analysis, but Taylor and LaBarre also introduce us to Commerce Bank in New York, Anthropologie, the GSD&M advertising agency, and others. These places, the authors argue, are changing what "work" means, and so creating not only customer and employee loyalty, but also (and therefore) business success.

The word *maverick* derives from Texan rancher and politician Sam Maverick, who allowed his unbranded cattle to roam semi-wild instead of branding them and penning them in fenced-in ranges. That sort of independent spirit describes the companies and business leaders profiled in this book. It remains to be seen whether theirs is the way of the future, but Taylor and LaBarre have made a solid (and energizing!) case that it is.

43 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mavericks inspire - but they don't offer the only recipe to success,, October 5, 2006

By	D. Stuart "Researcher at Kudos" (Auckland NZ) - See all my reviews

The role of Mavericks within the world of business is a seductive area for study, and here two founder journalists for Fast Company take us on a whirlwind tour of some outstanding examples; some well known and others making for fresh and inspiring copy for the jaded business reader. There's an underlying theme here - that old school business methods will lead to financial quagmires. In that context the likes of Ford (yesterday's hero company in books like Built to Last) look like today's losers.
From this readers point of view the authors may have logged thousands of hours researching their subject but still took the easy route: pointing to dozens of examples of successful maverick firms in order to posit that these people have the attributes, the corporate cultures, the sense of difference, that make them true winners. But it would be just as valuable to find Mavericks Who Failed - and I wonder if these original minds could also teach us something. I think this is biased sampling.
Make no mistake, this book is inspiring - but in making it case it reads mostly like an affirmation for today's managers who want to shake off the dust from 90s buisness excess. The writers swing the pendulum too far, and as an instructive business book I found it underplays the other factors that make for the business successes identified here: systems, (the man from Procter & Gamble would have had systems drummed into him) cash-flow, customer service and also the obscene element of luck that business writers too often forget about. Much as they like to be, managers - whether Jack Welch or Steve Jobs - are not masters of the universe.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Recommended reading for business people, January 8, 2007

By	armchairinterviews.com (Minnesota) - See all my reviews

(Also available as CD)

Anytime I hear the word "Maverick," I think either Tom Cruise in the movie Top Gun (before his couch-jumping days on Oprah) or a rebellious outcast in the workplace--so of course I was drawn to this book. The lime-green cover calling to me from the airport bookstore didn't hurt either.

Authors Taylor and Labarre, former editors of Fast Company magazine, encourage us to "think bigger, aim higher, and win more decisively" by following the maverick methods of 32 organizations including Southwest Airlines, Cranium (makers of popular board games), Commerce Bank, Craigslist, and others highlighted in this book. Their goal for Mavericks At Work is to open the reader's eyes, engage his imagination, and equip him with the tools to act boldly by sharing "next" rather than "best" practices relevant for the 21st century. After reading this book, I believe they've succeeded.

In 12 chapters, the authors discuss the value of disruptive points of view. By shunning traditional strategies, maverick companies like Cranium and Southwest Airlines have completely revitalized mature industries in order to reconnect with customers. The authors also highlight the value of open-source innovation in helping companies like Goldcorp tap into new ideas from external sources. Subsequent chapters emphasize the importance of innovation networks, continuous learning, emotional branding, and the power of people. The Appendix offers valuable resources for follow-on reading.

The writing is engaging and upbeat although I found it very difficult to follow the flow of the content and organization of this book. Chapters didn't transition smoothly so I had to re-read previous sections in order to figure out how the next chapter applied. It's possible that this follows the "maverick" style the authors are promoting. In other words, the authors are practicing what they preach by challenging the reader through a non-linear and original thought process. Still, Mavericks At Work is the treatise on how to be unique and profitable in a sea of copycat competitors.

This book is for corporate executives, entrepreneurs, or anyone desiring to break the mold by applying unconventional ideas and unusual strategies in order to reshape an industry, revitalize products and services, or even reinvent one's own perspective.

Armchair Interviews says: Highly recommended.