Here is an excerpt from an article written by Umair Haque for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Here’s a confession that may surprise no one who regularly reads this blog: I’m a misfit. And I always have been. And having spent a few decades on this planet as a slightly octagonal peg facing an endless vista of square, machine-made holes, I’ve developed a hypothesis about achievement.
It’s this: great accomplishment usually takes the impertinence not to fit into the suffocating status quo. Consider the following. Steve Jobs is a misfit — an unashamedly unbuttoned creative in a role usually reserved for the most robotically droidly of beancounters. Larry and Sergey are misfits. Shigeru Miyamoto, Gordon Ramsay, Jay-Z, JK Rowling, Indra Nooyi, Arianna Huffington? All slightly off-center outsiders — all challengers of the status quo, who’ve never quite fit neatly into its drab, bureaucratically predefined, dumbed-down boxes. Whomever you’d like to add to the list above, of this much I’m virtually certain: they’ll probably be a misfit.

It’s not that every misfit accomplishes something fundamentally unexpectedly awesome (for example, yours truly). And it certainly is the case that misfits have also been some of history’s greatest villains. But it’s also probable that most things unexpected, radical, and breathtakingly awesome take just a little bit of nonconformity; just a little bit of dissatisfaction with “the way things are.” In fact, I’d submit that a deep-seated failure to conform might just be the whirring, glub-glubbing pump hidden inside the finely marbled base of the fount of great achievement.

So here’s my question: what kind of misfit are you?

There are many ways to relax, let go, and let your awkard inner misfit shyly surface. You can be a misfit by simply listening to — and judiciously acting on — your urge to question the (often maddeningly brain-dead) why, who, what, where, when, how of any and every organization, plan, initiative, or idea. In roughly that order: questioning the “why” tends to be significantly more powerful — and warning: dangerous — than questioning the “how.” For example: “Why does Wall Street exist? Is it doing anything socially useful anymore — or is it mostly just a members’ club of rent-seekers in $5,000 suits?” (See how easy that was?)

I’d bet there’s a misfit just itching to be released inside each and every one of us. A heretic whose edges are scraping uncomfortably up against the bars of whichever industrial age institution we’re unlucky enough to be a part of (did I say “be a part of”? Sorry, I meant “have our souls imprisoned in Azkaban by”).

Hence, I’d say: the biggest and most unforgivable crime industrial age institutions commit against our humanity is to deny us the freedom of our own singular humanity. They stifle us at every turn, fitting us into neat boxes, relentlessly and brutally pressuring us — when they’re not pulverizing us — to conform, obey, fit in, toe the party line.

If you accept the heretical proposition that iron-clad conformity is probably history’s surest recipe for suffocating and squandering raw human potential, instead of sending it zooming up to a higher peak, then, here’s a corollary to my tiny hypothesis. If we had more freedom of individualism in organization, we’d have less politics, bureaucracy, jargon, time-wasting, wheel-spinning, and an almost embarrassing level of hubris that would have put Icarus to shame — and veritable monsoons more humility, imagination, creativity, empathy, trust, respect, wisdom. Not merely of the scripted, laughably artificial, absurdly lobotomized pointy-haired consultant-bought variety — as in “Hey, Bob, here’s a great idea: let’s add another blade to this disposable plastic widget of a razor. And then — wait, I know!! Let’s spend a few mil on a different athlete to make it look like testosterone on a spork!! How’s that for creative!!?”. But of the authentic, true, and meaningful kind: ideas and accomplishments that are disruptively world-changing, fundamentally unexpected, radically unimagined.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab and author of  The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. He also founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that shaped strategies across media and consumer industries.

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