Bill Taylor
Author, Mavericks at Work
Vuja Dé All Over Again
by Christine Flanagan
If BIF feels like home for Bill Taylor, that shouldn’t really be a surprise.
It’s not just that Taylor has been involved with BIF since its first Innovation Summit four years ago, or that he’s co-hosted the entire conference for the past two years.
The intellectual tie goes deeper than that: For the past 25 years (long before BIF was buff) Taylor has been an evangelist of innovation, helping to share the insights of creative thinkers and bring them together in forums—editorial or otherwise—where their ideas can enrich one another. From his early days working under Ralph Nader, discussing business with CEOs from a wide range of industries, to his stint as associate editor of the Harvard Business Review in the late 1980s to co-founding Fast Company magazine with his friend (and BIF-5 storyteller) Alan Webber, Taylor has witnessed many prime vantage point moments as wave after wave of innovation has reshaped America’s – and the world’s – business landscape.
“I just get excited and energized when I find innovators and entrepreneurs in all fields who are winning big because they’re playing the game differently,” says Taylor. “And that’s what BIF’s annual Collaborative Innovation Summit provides—it’s like a poetry slam for innovators. What a refreshing break from standard operating procedure.”
Taylor has spent much of his career traveling the world to uncover companies and individuals who are inventing the future of business, and represent the power of business at its best. His latest project–Practically Radical–is a follow-up to his best-selling 2006 book Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win which set out a collection of strategies and practices drawn from 32 of the world's most “creative and disruptive competitors”—organizations that thrived in the marketplace by rethinking the logic of how business gets done.
“In some sense, the new book is a sequel to Mavericks, but with a very different personality,” Taylor says. While Mavericks profiled organizations that thrived in the pre-economic crisis, Practically Radical reflects the “struggle we all face to make sense of the fallout from a once-in-a-lifetime crisis that promises to shape the economy for years to come, to learn lessons that will guide us as we recover and rebuild.”
By chronicling the radical shifts transforming business and the practical steps that will determine who wins, Taylor hopes to help companies avert the mistakes many leaders make during downtime—namely, learning the wrong lessons, becoming conservative and risk-averse, and resisting deep-seated change. “You can’t do big things anymore if you are content with doing things a little better than everyone else, or a little differently from how you’ve done them in the past,” warns Taylor. “Now more than ever, companies and their leaders have to offer a compelling alternative to a demoralizing and despairing status quo.”
While Taylor admits there’s nothing quite as exhilarating as watching a young organization reshape a field, there’s nothing quite as common as watching an established organization—a company that reached great heights in one era of technology, markets, and culture—struggle to regain its stature as a force for leadership in a new era. “Without doubt, the work of deep-seated, sustainable change remains the hardest work there is,” he adds.
Taylor finds that the best leaders demonstrate a capacity for vuja dé; a phrase he credits to comedian George Carlin. Described as the flip side of déjà vu which looks at unfamiliar situations with feelings like you’ve seen them before—vuja dé is valuable to innovation because it looks at familiar situations (an industry you’ve worked in for decades, products you’ve worked on for years) as if you’ve never seen them before. “It really helps you develop a new line of sight into the future,” Taylor observes. “The most creative CEOs I've met don't aspire to learn from the "best in class" in their industry. They aspire to learn from companies far outside their field as a way to shake things up and make real change.”
But does that mean companies should turn their backs on all that they’ve learned and earned? “History and tradition can be unrivaled sources of strength,” explains Taylor. “They are the foundation for an enduring sense of purpose that newcomers can’t begin to copy. Vuja dé aside, there’s nothing wrong with your organization that can’t be fixed by what’s right with it.”
