SESSION DESCRIPTION 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.
In this provocative presentation, William Taylor, founding
editor of Fast Company magazine and co-author of the forthcoming book Mavericks at Work,
offers an agenda for the future of business -- a set of ideas, and a
collection of case studies -- about how organizations can create a distinctive
presence in the marketplace, about the relationship between a company's
identity in the marketplace and its values in the workplace, and how the
best leaders attract the most ideas from the most talented people, whether
or not those people are employees of the organization.
This presentation 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.