Winning in business is an expert's game. The path to success, conventional wisdom would have it, is to study the market and your competition, hire consultants, apply best practices. One surprise of the Unconventionals—a podcast series that features businesses that succeed through disruptive strategies—is just how often people make the opposite point: they wouldn’t have succeeded if it wasn’t for their naiveté.
While naiveté has come to mean ignorant or simple-minded, the Latin root means natural, or self-taught. This is the quality these founders espouse: having confidence in one’s own ideas or vision. And for many unconventionals, their instincts are to do things a different way. Check out our most recent podcast, where we discuss how companies leveraged their “naiveté” to build standout—and successful—businesses.
Here are a few things we can learn from Converse, Unreal Candy, and Warby Parker about putting naiveté to work:
Trust your instincts. There is a reason so many businesses, marketing campaigns, and products look alike. People spend a lot of time looking over their shoulders at what everyone else is doing. We all have moments of originality and insight—where we clearly see an opportunity for innovation. Too many organizations reward risk aversion over originality. When I asked Converse CMO Geoff Cottrill what other brands they look to for marketing best practices, he said that they look inward for their inspiration. This introspection and confidence led to the launch of the one-of-a-kind Rubber Tracks Studio, a professional recording studio in Brooklyn that Converse opens up to musicians (a core customer segment) for free, with no strings attached.
Cultivate the Beginner’s Mind. The Beginner’s Mind is a Zen principle, popularized by Shunryu Suzuki. Suzuki teaches that the correct approach to Zen requires a lack of preconceptions, because “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” Disrupting a market demands exploration of new possibilities. Warby Parker chose to bypass traditional distribution channels and sell their designer eyeglasses online, at a fraction of competitors’ price. This wasn’t the instinct of the world-weary who has seen lots of ideas fail, but the beginner who is attentive to the untested and untried.
Mix in the experienced with the innocent. In a great article in FastCoDesign, Stanford’s Bob Sutton says “at places where intense innovation happens, they often combine people who know too little with people who know too much.” This is exactly the combination behind Unreal Brands, founded by a father-and-son team who launched a line of additive-free, all natural candies to compete with mass market brands. The inspiration came from 15-year-old Nicky Bronner, who couldn’t understand why the candy he loves is crammed with so much chemistry. His father, a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist, helped Nicky bring the idea to market.
Of course, expertise is critical, and every guest on the Unconventionals brings deep experience and skill to the table. But the story that doesn’t get told enough is how they nurtured their ideas through waves of objections and obstacles. This is the question to linger on—how do we recognize and protect disruptive insights—and their many possibilities—from being drummed out of our organizations too early?
