Passion Meets Profit

Anita Brick: This is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast to help you advance in your career.

Today we're delighted to have Bill Taylor as our guest. Bill is a provocative and inspiring voice on the future of business, an agenda-setting writer, speaker, and entrepreneur who has shaped the global conversation about the best way to compete, innovate, and succeed. As a cofounder and founding editor of Fast Company, Bill launched a magazine that won countless awards and earned a passionate following among executives and entrepreneurs all over the world. During his tenure, Fast Company won two coveted National Magazine Awards, was named Launch of the Year by Advertising Age, Startup of the Year by Adweek, and Magazine of the Year by Advertising Age.

Bill is an adjunct professor at Babson College and coauthor of four books on strategy, leadership, and innovation: The Big Boys: Power and Position in American Business, No-Excuses Management, Going Global, and what we're going to focus on today, Mavericks at Work. Bill has published numerous essays and articles and interviews in Harvard Business Review, and his monthly column “Under New Management” ran in the Sunday Business section of the New York Times. He's a graduate of Princeton University and the MIT Sloan School of Management. And he lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters. Well, welcome, Bill. How are you?

Bill Taylor: I'm doing great. Great to be here.

Anita Brick: You know, we're very excited. Our topic is passion meets profit. And people are often told, OK, you can find meaning in your work and maybe be poor, or you can have really high income, but not both. How and where do you think that passion actually does meet profit?

Bill Taylor: Sure. Well, first of all, I would say both those statements are certainly true. But I think the real sweet spot and the great opportunity and why we're all lucky to be living when we're living in terms of our pursuit of business, is that at some level, and certainly it's what we learned in Mavericks at Work, the companies and the leaders and the entrepreneurs that are winning really big today are the ones who begin with a sense of passion, and what we like to think of as a disruptive sense of purpose: Follow those ideas, build a company around them, and then watch what happens financially. I mean, when we began research on this book and we went out, we were gathering the set of companies that would form the backbone of the raw material for our ideas.

Obviously, we wanted companies that were generating tremendous results in the marketplace, winning big and doing great financial performance. But what we quickly came to understand was that there was an ironclad connection between the values—that is, a sense of passion and purpose that the company's founders and the companies themselves were demonstrating and the value they were creating in the marketplace.

Winning companies and successful entrepreneurs today don't just sell competitive products and services. They stand for important ideas—ideas they believe in, ideas that are meant to shape the future of their industry, ideas that are meant to reshape the sense of what's possible for customers, for employees, for investors. But behind each of the 32 companies and entrepreneurs we got to know was a distinctive and disruptive sense of purpose.

And that's where things started. And it was the organizations with a clear sense of purpose that were the ones that were winning the biggest. So I don't know if you want to go into detail on some of these, but, you know, ING Direct, the internet savings bank, it's been an incredible story, incredible growth story, in the last five years.

It's all about a commitment on the part of Arkadi Kuhlmann, the founder, and his colleagues to, quote unquote, lead Americans back to savings—that very deeply held sense of purpose is behind the company. Or think about Cirque du Soleil, which has become an incredible entertainment juggernaut around the world. You know, 50 million people have bought tickets to a Cirque show.

They're on the verge, the next year or two, of doing $1 billion a year in annual revenue. It’s not because, Guy Laliberté and his colleagues in Montreal behind Cirque have figured out a way to do the circus, you know, a little bit better than Ringling Brothers and make a few modest improvements; it’s because they have rethought, reimagined, reinvented what a circus and what live entertainment can be, and it really comes deeply out of their passion, their value system.

And then the killer company—and believe me, I love vigorous competition in the marketplace; I love meeting companies and entrepreneurs and CEOs who are just, you know, kicking the pants out of the competition. But what I find is the most ferocious and ambitious competitors in so many industries today begin not just with a kind of thirst for competition but a thirst to make an impact in the world and a hunger to bring certain ideas and values that the founders or the leadership shares and turn that into real impact in the marketplace.

And so I think this age-old notion that if you want to follow what you believe in, you've got to take a vow of poverty—first of all, there's nothing wrong with that. There are certain things you could do in the world that have tremendous impact, that are out of the business realm. And so that's still a choice that, you know, I think it's a wonderful choice for people to make. But the idea that, you know, you can't be an incredibly successful business person unless you put your values on the shelf is, I think, really a misreading of what's going on in the world today.

Anita Brick: Well, I'd like to talk a little bit more about ING Direct. I found that really fascinating. He's planted himself in Delaware, which is sort of the hotbed of credit card …

Bill Taylor: It is to credit cards what Silicon Valley is to the computer chip.

Anita Brick: Right. And I thought in the book, I found it really funny when he said he can't get reservations at a lot of restaurants because people think he's too provocative.

Bill Taylor: Sure. And that, I have to say, is part of Arkadi's personality. There's a kind of a misperception, that if you're a maverick, you have to be brash, a renegade, a rabble rouser. And I certainly enjoyed meeting those kinds of characters. That’s why I enjoyed getting to know Arkadi so much. There are all kinds of personality types that go with being a maverick.

But in the case of Arkadi, it really speaks to, again, not the disruptive technology, but I think it's a business culture. And as business students and as entrepreneurs, people in America tend to fall in love with two things, either a really radical, razzle dazzle new technology that's going to upset the applecart in an industry or a sector of the economy or, you know, an incredibly exciting, sleek new business model, where you rethink the economics of industry.

And both those things are crucially important. But when I first I spent a lot of time in Wilmington, when I first went down to Wilmington to meet Arkadi and talk about his business success, what he said was, you know, we'll get to the technology eventually, because ING Direct is basically an internet-only bank, no brick and mortar branches, no ATM machines.

And it really is certainly by far the runaway most successful internet-only bank in the world. But, so I wanted to talk all about the internet and you know, dot-com-ing the banking industry … it’s also, the economics of the business are just insanely compelling because costs are just incredibly low, which means the interest rates you can offer to depositors are really high.

And this thing has become this sort of online money machine. So I was really excited. You know, as all of us MBAs are, to talk about the business model. But again, he sat me down and very … it has happened in several other instances, believe me, very patiently explained to me, we'll get to the technology, we'll get to the business model.

But the first thing I want to do is explain to you the value system at this company. Or more to the point, the ideas we're fighting for in the marketplace, the impact we're trying to have on the financial services culture in America. And, you know, basically what he said is this company was started in September of 2000, based not on a technology but on a point of view.

And the point of view was the financials. It's his point of view. People can share it or not share it. But the point of view was the financial services business is basically encouraging too many people to spend too much, save too little, borrow too heavily, invest too recklessly. And we're creating a very anti-consumer culture in financial services in America.

And ING Direct wanted to be the kind of agent provocateur, the one alternative voice out there saying, don't spend your money, save your money, don't do internet day trading. Do some very simple mutual funds, some very simple CDs, and recover your sense of individual financial sanity. So all the products it develops; all the services it offers; its advertising to customers; its overall personality in the marketplace is essentially designed to, to be honest, poke a finger in the eye of the financial establishment and try to arouse the American savings public from this crazy path. It's been odd. And so what's really distinctive about ING Direct at the kind of root cause is this almost messianic fervor it has for changing the behavior of Americans with respect to financial services, which is why among, you know, other things, but which is why Arkadi decided to establish the headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, which really is the credit card capital of the world.

And one thing he said was, you know, I consider myself something of a preacher. And so I thought it made a lot of sense to preach among the heathens, that is to say, to headquarter the company, decide to break America from its addiction to the credit card in the credit card capital of the world. Though I have to say, Arkadi in terms of his personality is this kind of brash guy who loves controversy, loves nothing more than a good battle, even, by the way, with his own customers.

Part of being a maverick is also being edgy, being controversial, not being afraid to to shake things up. And so ING Direct now has 4.5 million customers in the United States. And it's got legendary customer service. And what Arkadi understands is this bank really isn’t for everybody. If you're a real high-maintenance kind of customer, if you want to know every, you know, twice a day, what's my balance?

What interest rate did I earn? What interest did I earn today? If you want to shift a lot of money around between your ING to another account, that's not what the bank is designed to do. It's a very highly, finely tuned economic model that allows them to keep costs low. So ING Direct literally fires 5,000 customers every month.

You wake up one morning and you see that your ING Direct balance is zero, and all your money has been transferred to your companion bank, from which you do your checking and your ATMs and all that kind of stuff. It's a very controversial practice. You can imagine that the people who get zeroed out and dismissed from the bank are very upset.

But, you know, Arkadi’s explanation is, our job is to agitate the marketplace. And by and large, we like to agitate from the positive point of view. But, you know, we've got a very finely tuned china shop here, and we can't let a lot of customers running around, a lot of bulls running around messing up our china shop. But I don't know a lot of companies in the banking industry, or any industry, who are excited and look forward to firing 5,000 customers every month. But this is one company that does.

Anita Brick: Yeah, I guess Southwest is like that too. Well, I have a question that sort of relates to this from an alum, and this alum wanted to know if, does this person have to go in on their own, or could they monetize their interests, skills, and values within an existing company?

Bill Taylor: That's a really crucial point. And certainly we went out of our way in the book to make the case and to identify exciting initiatives whereby it's not the case that the only way to be a maverick is to do your own startup and to start with a blank sheet of paper. There were some really fun and instructive examples of what we call grassroots leadership—people being undeniable leaders, impact players, making a huge difference in the marketplace, in the world, but doing it from inside the confines of a large, established company, rather than thinking the only way to do this is in the form of a startup.

Now, I have to be honest. As hard as it is to start a company from scratch and, you know, to have it survive, let alone succeed, but then to have it succeed on the scale of an ING Direct or a Southwest Airlines as just mentioned or several of the other startup operations we write about the book—it is, I would say, much harder to make radical, deep-seated change inside the warm cocoon of a large, successful, organization because, you know, it just brings about that many more amounts of resistance, barriers, and so on.

But that said, if you can somehow combine the sense of passion, the sense of purpose and agility of some of these startup mavericks with the clout, resources, market presence of the giants, you could do something really remarkable. Maybe my favorite example in the book of that situation is a guy named Larry Houston, who is the vice president of innovation at Procter & Gamble.

And what he has done in the last five or six years is really nothing short of a revolution in terms of how Procter & Gamble thinks about its entire R&D innovation function. And he, again, began with a very clear sense of purpose, which was his deep commitment shared by A.G. Lafley, the CEO, that with respect to innovation, R&D, and technology, the world was in the middle of a very dramatic transformation in terms of the globalization of brainpower and knowledge and smarts, and it was no longer particularly effective for Procter & Gamble to say the only way we're going to develop new ideas, new products, new technologies is to have full-time researchers on staff in Cincinnati thinking we were the smartest people in the world. Their new thought was, nobody is as smart as everybody. So how can we not outsource our, you know, R&D to India and China?

But how can we as an organization say, look, there are a lot more smart people out there in the world who will never work for P&G as employees, but could work with P&G as partners, collaborators, idea generators. The very specific challenge they set for themselves was, how could we make sure that half, 50 percent of all the ideas for new products, new technologies, new packaging, half of all the ideas for innovation at Procter & Gamble begin outside the company.

We find them, acquire them, partner with them, but some other— bring stuff from the outside and bring it in rather than thinking we have to do everything ourselves. And talk about a radical mindset shift, a radical operational shift, just a radical strategic and R&D transformation. And you know, Larry Houston, the last six years has done an amazing job of not just changing the R&D priorities but changing the whole innovation culture at Procter & Gamble.

We spent a lot of time with him, and he, like Arkadi, has this really deeply felt individual sense of passion and purpose about an ever-globalizing world; about the promise as opposed to the peril that that holds. And so you absolutely can do this stuff from inside large, established companies. But to be honest, I think it's that much harder than doing it with a blank sheet of paper.

Anita Brick: What do you think are some key clues as, say, people are kind of detectives looking for these more maverick kinds of organization? What are some key things that they could look for?

Bill Taylor: Well, that's a great question. And we have—I don't want to overdo it, but we have a set of questions or, that's a good way of thinking about it, a clue. You know, I always get invited, you know, back in the days of being the founder and editor of Fast Company. Say, hey, I get phone calls: Hey, you know, we think we're a fast company. Come by the day with us. Tell us what you think. Or now, you know, I read your book, Mavericks at Work. We think we're doing some pretty maverick stuff. Come see what we're doing. And, you know, I typically go with a very small set of questions or a kind of detective’s list of clues I'm looking for.

The first one involves what we've been talking about up to now. I'm not so interested if you’ve got, Hey, we've got this new killer app technology that everybody agrees is the cool thing. Or we've got the hottest product at our space right now. The question really is, can I look at the strategy? Can I look at the strategic direction of the company and say, is there a disruptive idea at the heart of this thing?

Are you trying not just to sell good products, but are you trying to, one way or another, have a huge, transformational impact on your industry? So that's my first question. The second question, and this is where a lot of companies fall out, is do you operate in the workplace as distinctively as you compete in the marketplace? I've really been struck by the mavericks we got to know in this book: how direct a line they draw between their presence and personality and ideas in the marketplace and their presence, personality, and the ideas around which they build a workplace. I mean, there's no distinction anymore between a brand and the outside world and who you've got to be within the confines of your organization. So the second question is, do you work as distinctively as you compete?

Third question that I always look for is the nature of the relationship between a company and its customers, and quite specifically, are companies trying not just to sell value. We're cheaper. We're, you know, we're 5 percent cheaper, we're 10 percent higher quality, we've got the most functionality. Are they trying not just to sell value, but are they trying to share their values as well?

Are they trying to make an economic and psychological contract with their customers, which separates them from the crowd? And I think this is maybe the greatest missed opportunity in business today. I mean, any industry you could name, there is too much choice, too many options, too many ads, too much stuff for customers to sort through. It is a world of overcapacity, oversupply, and utter sensory overload in the … you know, there is no shortage of good deals out there in business today, whether in the computer industry, the car industry, it's a great, great time to be a customer in terms of the dollars and cents calculations.

What there really is, however, is a great shortage of a genuine sense of connection between companies and their customers. So I'm always looking for customers, for companies that say the real challenge we're trying to meet, the real opportunity we're trying to develop is not just to offer a slightly better deal in our business, but to create a more memorable way to do business with customers and forge links with customers that are going to separate us from everybody else.

So the last but not least, and it sort of evokes the Larry Houston discussion we just had, I have always … I love innovation. In some sense, the mavericks work is all about innovation. I'm always looking for companies that are rethinking the process of innovation itself and asking themselves the very important question: OK, we're all about new ideas. Where do new ideas come from, exactly?

And my deeply held belief, it's probably my favorite part of the book, is that today—and Larry Houston at P&G is showing this—is new ideas can come from anyone in the world, and anywhere in the world, if you're smart enough to ask. I'm always looking for companies who say to themselves, people don't have to work for us in order to work with us.

And even if we're a small, tiny company, how do we open ourselves up to the best thinking from the outside world and get really brilliant people wherever they might be to play with us a little bit.

So I mean, the four screens I use are: Do you have new and exciting answers to some very basic questions? What's a winning competitive strategy look like in a world that's more competitive than ever? How do you make deep and enduring connections with customers when customers have more choices than ever? Do you have an exciting new philosophy of innovation? What's your answer to the very simple question, where do new ideas come from? And are you getting more than your fair share of the best people in your business?

How are you waging and winning the battle for talent? That goes back to the workplace stuff. So those are the four basic criteria I use as I get to know a company.

Anita Brick: Great. Well, I have a follow-on question to that from an evening student, and he said, how can you identify if the organization is the right place to monetize your interests, skills, and values other than deep interviewing with the company?

Bill Taylor: Well, let me try to answer that in two ways. One is, maybe the least compelling way, will be kind of like at the tactical level, but the other one would be at a more philosophical level. I guess that's a little bit the place I operate in. But what strikes me … and you read all the social science research or just go sit inside these organizations for long periods of time, and Polly LaBarre, my coauthor, and I spent lots and lots of time inside these companies and we, you know, did a few jobs inside the companies and took a lot of classes at their training classes or corporate universities, went to a lot of company events … to some degree, I suppose we were looking at them from the point of view of someone considering working there. Or is this the best place to turn an idea into a reality?

What strikes me so much is that very quickly, when you're quote unquote, inside a company, the company itself sort of begins to fade away as the relevant unit of analysis. And, I think ultimately, people aren’t loyal to companies as much as they're loyal to the group of individuals around whom they interact most closely, work most closely every day.

People are, by and large, loyal and committed or not loyal and not committed, to one another and to their direct supervisor or their specific boss. I mean, Marcus Buckingham, the great thinker about organizations, always says people don't quit companies, they quit bosses. And I think there's really something very profound to that. So if you're an ambitious person and you've got something you really want to do, and the question in front of you is, is this the right place to be doing it? Sure, at some point you've got to think about the company writ large and the name on the letterhead and all that kind of stuff. But ultimately, it could be a great company. But if you're in a big, great company, and happened to be in a part of that company where it's not such a great unit, or you've got a not-so-great boss, the fact that you're working at a great company is kind of irrelevant.

And so to me, if you're an ambitious person who wants to do something in the world, what you've got to figure out is, am I working with people who if for whatever reason, I had to stop working with them tomorrow, I would feel horrible about that. I would consider it a really terrible loss. And so I'm working with a group of people I can't imagine not working with. And I've got, in terms of the organization chart, one or two rungs above me, a bunch of bosses, leaders who are teaching me things, who are giving me elbow room and head room and are creating a great environment for me.

And I think that's the more urgent question than is this 300,000-employee global company writ large a good company. And so I think being very honest with yourselves about, at a kind of a granular level, is this the right place for me in terms of the people that surround me every day and the people for whom I work, are they giving me opportunities to learn, to develop?

They have an impact. I mean, nobody wants to go to work. Even if it’s for a great company, if you feel, you know, what I do around here doesn't really matter, and if I showed up on Monday, no one would miss me. So I think the unit of analysis has to be pretty low to the ground.

Anita Brick: OK, so how do you do that for a prospective employer?

Bill Taylor: Well, I guess that's where the issue of tactics could be … First of all, you've got to answer some very basic questions. And, companies … I mean, again, one thing that really struck me as I got to know so many of these companies is, you know, one of the questions you always get is, if a company is a great competitor in the marketplace, are they always great places to work?

And the answer is, well, it kind of depends on who you are. I mean, what I found so clearly is if you've got a really distinctive strategy in the marketplace, in terms of employee management, whatever, you're not for everybody. It takes a certain kind of person to thrive at ING Direct, a certain kind of person to thrive at Southwest Airlines, a certain kind of person to thrive at Cirque du Soleil or whatever.

And it's not that those kinds of people are better than people who wouldn't thrive there, but rather, if a company stands for something unique in the marketplace, it is building a culture around which to do that, then, almost by definition, it's not for everybody. And you've got to figure out, like the most basic question you've got to ask yourself as you're evaluating the company as a whole, is: does the value system of the company—what it's trying to do with the world—map to my personal value system?

Do I have not just the credentials to stand out there, but do I have the character traits and the personality attributes and value system to feel incredibly comfortable and at home there? And if you don't, that doesn't mean that it's a bad company or you're a bad person. It just means that that company is not for you or you're not a great fit for the company.

So if you look at it from the other side of the coin for just a second, I was amazed to see at so many of these companies we got to know, that they all believe in this very simple principle that you hire for attitude and you trade for skill. That when they evaluate employees … But I think it works the other way as well.

When they evaluate employees, they're much more concerned about who you are as a person and what makes you tick, as opposed to, from a technical point of view, what you know at any one time in the skill level you have. They can teach you the skills to be a great banker or to be an airline strategist or whatever, but they can't change your stripes in terms of the value system.

And so again, what also struck me is, you know, so many of these companies, they actually make it a point to recruit, whether it's frontline employees or even managers and executives, to recruit people from outside their industry. They feel that, oh, you know, if you're doing something really distinctive and special in the marketplace, you can't fill the organization with industry veterans.

I think that same thinking goes from the employee to the employer. And it's not just, hey, is it a well-performing company financially? If I get a good stock option package, do I have a chance with those options to be in the money rather than the … What the question is, is the organizational DNA really in sync with your values?

And the only way you can figure that out is to spend as much time as you can inside the company. Talk to people who maybe have left the company and figure out did they leave for reasons that make a lot of sense? Do they leave it for reasons that raise red flags? Try to get yourself invited to some as an observer, to some company events and rituals and really get a sense of what is fundamentally—you know, I hate that word culture, but what is the culture of the company and is it a place that feels not just comfortable to me, but feels in sync with what I think is important in the world. And to me, that values match is just so crucially important in terms of the relationship between a company and the employees and executives in the company.

Anita Brick: Well, here's a question that kind of follows on with that whole hiring process. An alum asked this question. The experienced hiring process, especially in more entrepreneurial ventures, is often quite unstructured. And his question is, what are some best ways to create both a process when there may not be one, and an urgency with a target employer?

Bill Taylor: Well … I'm sorry. This question is coming from the point of view of the company or the employee?

Anita Brick: The employee. An employee who is a more experienced hire, once you enter a more maverick kind of company that has an entrepreneurial … But their hiring process is not very structured, and there isn't a real sense of urgency necessarily to add on talent. So is there a way … are there any recommendations …

Bill Taylor: First of all, I would take that as a danger sign that maybe this company isn't quite as accomplished or as much of a maverick as you thought it was. We have all these screens that we use that we just talked about in terms of what makes not just a maverick company, but a company that can endure for the long term.

I think the place where most companies fall down, and what gives me the most pause, is precisely in this hiring battle for talent. What I get most excited about, and what we saw so often, the companies who really, really believe in the use of talent as a competitive advantage in the marketplace, who take this seriously, are just as rigorous, just as disciplined, just as creative about the hiring and recruiting process as they are about any other process in the business.

Now, you just talked about what happens when you encounter a company, and they're not very organized, they're not very urgent. They're not, you know, very thoughtful about it. Well, can you imagine saying to yourself, what happens when you encounter a company that's not very organized, urgent, or thoughtful about the finance function or the R&D function or the internet marketing function?

I mean, you would say to yourself, if you don't have your act together on finance, how could I work for you? If you don't have your act together on R&D, how could I work for you? And yet we find it sort of unremarkable when companies don't have their act together on the talent thing. And my take on it is, if you don't have your act together on the talent front, why are you a company I want to work with?

Because the only companies that succeed going forward are those that get more than their fair share of the best people in the business. And again, and I won't go into excruciating detail now, but so many of the companies we write about have developed incredibly … I mean, they're just almost to the level of Dr. Strangelove kind of deal … totally committed to making the hiring, recruiting, talent acquisition process just as organized, just as disciplined, just as rigorous, and just as creative, by the way, as any other piece of business.

So if somehow or other you feel as an experienced executive, you have to somehow force your way into a company or scream from the rafters, why aren’t you making your decision quickly enough? Why aren’t you taking me serious enough? Why don't you have a sense of urgency as someone with great contributions to make, to invite me into your company?

Certainly you can keep shouting louder and pounding on the door more aggressively. But you also may want to take that as a sign that maybe this company isn't quite as compelling as I thought it was, because, I mean, from a company point of view, the first battle you have to win is the battle for talent. If you win the battle in the workplace, that's going to allow you to win the battle of the marketplace.

Anita Brick: Great. Thanks. It's interesting because if you're not creating the urgency, what if things are declining and something radically needs to change in another area, if they have that same kind of lack of rapid …

Bill Taylor: If you’re not urgent about hiring absolutely the best people in your industry, what the heck are you urgent about?

Anita Brick: Yeah. No. Absolutely. All right. So completely different. Now, here's another question from an alum who is in the nonprofit world. Let me read this to you. And he would like your comment. Yes, it's often easier to find meaningful work in the nonprofit sector as opposed to the private sector of business. In most cases, this does not come without sacrificing some compensation, but what I'm concerned about is whether or not I'm sacrificing career prospects, limiting my growth, and restricting me to the nonprofit sector going forward.

Bill Taylor: Well, that's a tough question to offer a general answer to. I think a couple things. I think increasingly, for-profit companies recognize that a lot of … and you know, Peter Drucker had a quote about this, you know, 25 years ago. So there's nothing you can say that Peter Drucker, one way or another, hasn't already said.

But I think in some sense, for-profit companies are recognizing that the leadership skills and the powers of persuasion and the capacity to get maximum impact out of limited resources, and the capacity to generate a sense of excitement and commitment around a mission and a cause as opposed to just, you know, internal rate of return, that sort of stuff—all the stuff that in theory, high-impact people in the nonprofit, not-for-profit sector are really good at—are increasingly precisely the kinds of things that are on the leadership agenda in the for-profit sector.

I'm sure there is still very much in the mediocre middle of companies a sense that, OK, if you were the chief operating officer of a $200 million a year nonprofit organization, what really can you do for us kind of deal, or if you were the head of marketing for it?

But I think for more savvy and enlightened companies, they … and again, we talked about earlier hiring for attitude training for skill, and recruiting people from outside the conventional realms in various industries. I think more savvy and enlightened companies, which presumably are the kind of companies your alumni would want to work for, understand that. Holy cow, all of the challenges you've been dealing with, all the skill sets you've had to master, you know, a great example is understanding, one way or another, how to get the most out of a volunteer workforce.

Well, the fact of the matter is, in most companies today, we're essentially dealing with volunteer workforces. I mean, most work is organized into teamwork. And most people, if they have a modicum of brainpower whatsoever, will only be on the teams they really want to be on, and they will figure out ways to not be on a team they don't want to be on.

In some sense, if you're a middle- or upper-middle-level executive at a major company, you're essentially assembling volunteer workforces all the time. You've got to persuade your colleagues to work on your project, work on your initiative, work on your team as opposed to someone else’s team. Well, this is what people in the nonprofit sector do all the time: persuading business people, busy people, to give up some number of hours per day to work on their cause as opposed to some other cause.

So I think among savvy, enlightened companies, they would look upon a track record in the not-for-profit world as actually a very compelling and interesting background in terms of meeting some of the some of the challenges today of the for-profit world.

So I'm going to be honest, I would say that a lot of, you know, as I say, sort of middling, muddling, mediocre sort of companies, they wouldn’t get that. But who wants to work for those kinds of companies anyway? So I don't think it's somehow any great career sacrifice to say, hey, you know what? I really want to spend 10, 15 years … or if I spend 10 or 15 years working in the not-for-profit world, being great at what I do, I have ruled out any kind of shift into more conventional business settings. I don't think that's the case anymore at all.

Anita Brick: Well, I think the point you made about the analogy or the parallel between these sort of matrix kind of organizations in business and having to recruit people and having to keep them motivated because they don't report to you, or they could be on your team or not on your team, is a very good one and could be used in a transitional story if someone is going from for-profit to nonprofit. So thank you for that. That was great.

So I'd like to turn to you for a moment if we could. And you have this history of making passion profitable. Tell us about how you've accomplished it and maybe a couple of key turning points in the process, because we know it wasn't a straight line.

Bill Taylor: Sure, sure. Well, I guess I'd say a couple of things. And, you know, the thing I'm, you know, maybe best known for being an entrepreneur is starting Fast Company. And my cofounder, Alan Webber, and I—this is the bar I talk about that's the older I feel, but we actually put our final touches on the business plan on June 1st, 1993, and spent 18 months, you know, wandering the wilderness kind of deal and launched the first issue after we got our financial backing in October of 1995, we did the deal on April 1st, 1995.

And, you know, I have met a lot of people who assume, you know, this thing worked because you must have had an incredibly dazzling business plan, and your numbers were great. And the fact of the matter is, and I think this is true of a lot of entrepreneurs, if you're honest about it, Alan and I started Fast Company for a very simple reason, which was we couldn't imagine not starting it.

We had so much we wanted to say. It really did begin with a sense of passion and purpose. So much we wanted to say about where we thought business, leadership, and competition could and should be going. The magazine began not with spreadsheets and business models, but with a point of view about—first of all, what we thought the business conversation could and should look like.

And a sense that, you know, the world of magazines, as one of the worlds that really shapes that conversation, just wasn't … as currently constituted, it wasn't suited to taking that conversation to that place. We thought there was this huge, huge opportunity to create a new voice in business that if we did a good job of it, people would listen to.

And so the whole idea for the company began not with numbers and spreadsheets and finding a niche, but with a sense that we really had a set of ideas we wanted to share with the world and a belief that if we did it well, the world was ready to hear them.

Secondly, we said … it sounded immodest at the time, but the second thing we said was, we don't want to just launch a magazine. We want to launch a movement. We don't want to just put another product out in the marketplace. We want a larger product which is so distinctive, so original, that people who share our values and ideals would come to look at it as almost a flag of affiliation or an emblem of belonging.

And we would put together a community of like-minded people who wouldn't just read the articles and say, oh, that was interesting. Let me, you know, save that one for the files. They would become passionately and emotionally invested in the magazine. And that goes back to this idea of how do you make a connection with your customers that goes beyond just functionality and dollars and cents.

And, you know, once something works, you kind of go back and pretend you knew a lot of stuff going into it that you really didn't know. But the two things we really did, though, is if we were true to our point of view about the world and stayed true to our ideals, we kind of felt like the numbers of the business would work out.

And so we're not going to spend a lot of time with the numbers of the business. We want to spend a lot of time on fine-tuning the point of view, and … the idea was we didn't want to just launch a marginally better magazine. We wanted to launch a new phenomenon, a new brand, a new source of energy in the marketplace that if it clicked with people, it would click very deeply. People would get very passionate about it. I have to say, those are things we thought from the very beginning, and those worked out really well. So in that sense, maybe we're a little smart, but I think the aphorism is also true: It's better to be lucky than smart. I mean, if you look at our business plan, the word “internet,” world wide web, Netscape—we had no idea the internet wave was going to hit us, and that the business culture was going to be incredibly caught up in the dot-com mania, which is both a blessing and a curse for us. But, you know, Netscape went public in August of 1995. The first issue of Fast Company came out in October of ’95.

And very quickly we just got caught up in this positive tidal wave of excitement, enthusiasm, energy—and, oh, by the way, lots of advertising dollars surrounding Fast Company, because we came to be known as kind of a voice of the internet era. Now, I’ve got to tell you, we never intended to be a voice of the internet era.

We intended to be a voice about the future of business and innovation. And so while the internet era came to adopt us, but, you know, we tried as hard as we could not to get too caught up in that ourselves and stay true to our vision. But again, if we'd had the same idea and launched it in the middle of 2001, whatever it was, obviously we wouldn't have had the nearly the success we had. So I don't want to overdo the “smart” part, because obviously we know how lucky we are in terms of our timing.

The other thing I would say we did, correctly and well—and I guess you always just project out from your own personal experiences, but I think you see this in a lot of startups—is the fact that there were two of us, Alan Webber and me, and that we really were, you know, best friends in some sort of way, or at the very least, two people who had maybe slightly different skills but a totally shared belief in what we were trying to do.

Like I said, we put the finishing touches on the business on June 1st, ’93. We launched the company, you know, got our funding April 1st, ’95. So that was like an 18-month journey. To me, the challenge of that journey—and then once the thing began—the challenge, again, was not financial as much as it was just managing your emotions and a sense of persistence and, you know, rejection … or you have a good meeting with a venture capitalist or a potential publishing partner, and it's a good meeting. But ultimately, they call back a day later and say, sorry, we don't want to fund you. There were plenty of times where I was ready to just give up before it even started and say, screw this. I've got to go out and make a living. I've got better things to do with my life.

And Alan would be the one who was in a positive mood and buck me up. And likewise, Alan would have had enough after our, you know, 10th trip to New York that month and 10 rejections saying, you know what? I've got two kids. I’ve got to go feed my family. Heck with this. And I would be the one who was on the upbeat track.

And so I do think the power of two who really have a shared belief in an idea and who not just complement each other technically—I think that's important—but I think really, partnerships allow you to stay with the game that much longer to manage your emotions, in that much more of a stable way and just to deal with the rollercoaster of ups and downs that come with the territory of starting something new.

Four people or five people may be too unwieldy a team. The lone genius ... but you’ve got to have a really thick skin to be the lone genius and see it through. There's just something about the power of a founding team of two that strikes me as a really compelling thing.

And so I often recommend to people who are thinking about starting a new enterprise, you know, the best thing to do is find someone who you couldn't imagine not starting this with, keeping it to the two of you, and really using that as a way to manage the emotional journey and just stay in the game. I mean, Woody Allen was right: 85% of life really is just showing up. But there are so many people I know who've had awesome ideas who just, you know, after six or eight or nine months of trying to get it off the ground, it's not happening, they just give up on it, and, you know, it may be the right decision for them at the time. But I think to myself, how many people gave up three months before that magic meeting was about to happen that would have gotten it off the ground?

The fact that we were able to stay in the fight for 18 months, which at the time seemed like forever. But the minute we had the company going, we kind of forgot about that. It felt like, oh geez, we've been doing this for 18 hours, it didn’t seem like 18 months. So that was a really key lesson for me as well.

Anita Brick: Cool. Well, one final question. If you were going to give advice to a person on how to prepare to find, get hired, and succeed in a maverick organization where passion does meet profit, how do you think about it in terms of mentally or financially or strategically or tactically? What advice would you give our listeners?

Bill Taylor: I think it would be to study the company as deeply as they can, and then study themselves as deeply as they can to basically answer the question, does the sense of purpose, the sense of mission of the organization map to your own individual sense of purpose, in terms of the impact you want to have in the world, then when you go and encounter that organization, can you tell that story and make that case as crisply and persuasively as you can.

And don't get caught up in credentials: you know, I went to the University of Chicago Business School. I've got a finance degree. And so my technical skills are beyond a doubt. Don't get too caught up in credentials that are hard skills, but rather understand the connection between what makes me as a person tick and what makes this company and the culture and a disruptor in the marketplace tick.

Try to connect and click with that organization at that level, because I think that's how you're going to get traction with the leadership of that organization. It’s also, by the way, how are you going to figure out once you begin encountering it, maybe this company's reputation in the world is far in excess of what it's really like once you really go inside the walls.

And so if somehow that values match isn’t there, that's a good warning sign for you. But really figure out, am I connecting? And do I have a chance to thrive at the … where we began the conversation, at the level of passion and purpose? And make sure that's in sync, that's working, well, then everything else should follow after that.

Anita Brick: In addition to reading Mavericks at Work, I know in the back of the book you have a whole list of resources that people could read for this particular purpose of finding and researching and seeing if you sync up with the organization. Are there any of the resources in the back of Mavericks at Work that you'd recommend?

Bill Taylor: Sure. I’d say a couple. The first one is this guy Robert Kelley at Carnegie Mellon. Great guy, has done a whole series of articles, but also a book on quote unquote, how to be a star at work. And there's a book in there of his we recommend, and if I can conjure up the exact name ...

Anita Brick: I think that's the name of the book, actually. There's a book he wrote, a book called How to Be a Star at Work.

Bill Taylor: That's a great, great book in the following sense—and I think he chose that provocative title on purpose, which is obviously, American culture is caught up in a star system. And, you know, there's people who go to elite business schools like the University of Chicago and graduate with, you know, great degrees and so on, have a certain star quality, or star sense of themselves and what Professor Kelley does so eminently well is to figure out how do you square individual ambition and the eagerness to be a star as an individual with companies who are dedicated and determined to have a real impact in the marketplace, companies of which in some sense, the system itself, the organization itself, is the star and not the individual.

I think that's the best book I've seen to figure out, one, how am I true to myself, my individual ambitions and so on, but how do I become a high-impact performer without people dismissing me as a jerk? Now, the second book I would recommend—it's not out yet, it comes out, I think, later this month—I'm gonna have to use a slight four-letter term, to give you the title, but there's a really awesome guy named Bob Sutton.

He's an endowed-chair professor at Stanford, not at the business school, but the engineering school. But he's basically a business school professor, and he's a totally accomplished, award-winning guy, but he's really got a rollicking presence. So he's written a new book. It's going to be out, pretty sure in late December, early January, called The No Asshole Rule.

And it's basically a book about the sobering reality that, particularly in a large organization, wherever we go, we encounter executives, or maybe we act in ways ourselves, who, unfortunately, live up to that slightly off-color name. And this is a book, sort of the next iteration of the Kelley stuff, that is trying to teach people, Sure, you're impatient. Sure, you're ambitious. Sure, you want to have an impact. Here's how to do all that without your colleagues thinking you're an asshole. And it's really … one of the nice things about being in the business, I mean, you get to read all these books before the general public gets to see them. It's an awesome book.

It is brutally honest and quite brilliant. So when it comes out, or if your listeners are going into the bookstore to buy their copy of Mavericks at Work, they should preorder a copy of this Bob Sutton book. It’s really absolutely fantastic.

And I think that's the tightrope act really talented, ambitious, well-credentialed people have to work is, you know, how am I true to myself? How do I have the kind of impact, be this impatient, young, on-the-go person, but make my contribution being respectful of and consistent with the broader goals of whatever organization I'm in. And it's one thing to be a maverick. It's another thing to be, you know, ruffling so many feathers so much of the time that people want to run you out of town.

And so how do you do that tightrope walk? Those are two books, the Robert Kelley book and the Bob—I guess your name has to be some derivative of Robert for this to work—that are really, really super guides to that very human dilemma.

Anita Brick: I did say that was the final question, but I have one really final question, and that's what's next for you?

Bill Taylor: Well, a couple things further off the books. I've only been out for 10 weeks, so there's much more to be done with the book. I think the year 2007 will be about taking the maverick message global. We've already sold the rights to the book in 15 different countries; it’s going to be translated already to 12 different languages.

And so I think maybe 2007 is the year we kind of export these ideas to the rest of the world. I have to be honest, though. There's something … but I'm not eager to get back into the magazine business. We sold Fast Company several years ago, kind of at the height of the dot-com fever. Again, better to be lucky than smart, although we stayed with that for several years thereafter. But I'm out of the grind of the magazine rat race, and I don't really have a great hankering to go back to that, but I … you know, I like being a kind of solo practitioner, having these books and so on.

But there's nothing like building an organization, having a team of people who share a belief in these things, kind of why we wrote the book in the first place. So I haven't figured it out yet, and I'm not very articulate about it. But if there's some way of to some degree, evoking the spirit of the Fast Company enterprise, which is sort of to-down thought leadership on the one hand, and shaping the conversation about the business, married to the raw energy of hundreds of thousands or millions of people who share what you're doing and want to contribute to it.

And obviously doing that in more of an electronic online space than a, you know, dead tree sort of thing, I'd love to have some fun with that. I just don't yet have, to be honest with you, a line of insight into how you do that kind of stuff on the … I mean, I can, you know, dope out a magazine—give me a, you know, dog grooming, and I could kind of in my head dope out what a dog grooming magazine—there are 15 of them already, but what a dog grooming magazine … Well, I mean, I'm just a print person by nature, but how do you create that same sense of wow from a top-down basis, hear all these thought leaders and cutting-edge companies, in this electronic media.

But on the other hand, you're also unleashing on a daily basis all of the contributions that are due to the people who are coming to the site. I wish I had a business model, a way of just visualizing what that would look like. I don't yet, but I want to play around with that and figure out, can we take some of this spirit and substance and have it sort of live as an ongoing thing online?

So if any listeners have ideas for that, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Anita Brick: Yeah. And to do that, you can—and thank you. We would like to have you keep us posted, but, to contact Bill, you can go to Mavericks at Work.

Bill Taylor: Mavericksatwork.com, you know, it's a lot of good stuff on the site that's not just the book but some resources and references; for instance, we've got a maverick manifesto that you could download. But obviously there's email addresses to get ahold of me or my coauthor, Polly LaBarre.

Anita Brick: And there's an excerpt on our site of your book.

Bill Taylor: Oh, fantastic.

Anita Brick: Oh thank you Again, Bill, thanks so much for doing this. This was very enlightening—very, very, enlightening, encouraging and, making us think.

Bill Taylor: Oh, my pleasure. What a fun conversation. Thanks for thinking of me.

Anita Brick: So thanks very much, and thank you all for listening to CareerCast of the Chicago GSB. Keep advancing the network until next time.