Well I was leafing thru Inc. Magazine today and I was intrigued by this article about a company called Threadless
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080601/the-customer-is-the-company.html
I am always amused by articles like this that mention, but otherwise gloss over, the fact that the owners of this amazingly up and coming company are college dropouts.
I have to be careful here– I don’t mean to say these guys are stupid, as they certainly are not . . . But they HAVE expertly used the principles of applied stupidity. In this case, had these owners been trained in standard business models, I sincerely doubt that they would have built a company on such a totally new model. As is so often the case, like famed college dropouts Bill Gates and Michael Dell before them, their lack of "training" has been a huge advantage for them.
Education, as defined as knowing the old systems well, is a tremendous disadvantage in the internet age. The idea that you can learn these new approaches while you are using old models as a reference is, I think, a huge mistake. It’s like defining automobiles as horseless carriages. It slows down innovation. The human mind can leap into amazing new dimensions if set free. The hardest part, for many people, is that they are steeped in a belief in what used to work, and whatever new thing we do can only be a slight variation of the old.
We are entering into a period of social and economic innovation that can best be compared to the musical innovations of the 50's and 60's. In that era, no one had ever used the new electronic capability that had been just made available in studios . . . The unexpected results included Sgt Pepper, Good Vibrations, and the Wall of Sound. And now in the internet, the whole world is confused and amazingly open to ideas and approaches . . . Eventually things will top out and the people who prefer control over innovation will get a handle on it and we’ll go back to the that eventually, but right now we’re just starting to see the what the gizmo generation is capable of coming up with if allowed to just do it the way that makes sense to them as they start their own companies . . . as the advice offered by established business experts becomes less and less relevant.
©Justin Locke
