Mavericks at Work

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Mavericks at Work by William Taylor and Polly LaBarre, both formerly of Fast Company magazine, is a look at a wide range of companies who are turning their industries on their heads by doing business differently than those that went before them. I have to say that I’m a sucker for this kind of book: lots of stories about companies large and small who you may or may not have heard of (HBO, Pixar, Cranium, DPR Construction), examining what they’ve achieved and how they’ve gone about it.

The book is split into four parts: Rethinking Competition, Reinventing Innovation, Reconnecting With Customers and Redesigning Work. Each section covers its topic with relish, relaying stories such as how HBO decided to “jump off [the] cliff” of providing different and better television that was worth paying for, leading it to earn profits of some $1.1 billion in 2004 at a time when everyone else was working to humiliate people in more and more bizarre ways in order to win advertisers.

One of my favourite stories is that of Rob McEwan of Goldcorp a mining company sitting on a 55,000 acre site in Ontario containing gold – somewhere. After six years of struggling to identify exactly where and how much gold lay in the ground, McEwan attended a conference at MIT where he leared about Linux and the open-source movement. This gave him the idea to launch the “Goldcorp Challenge” – very similar to the recent Netflix Prize – where teams from around the world downloaded Goldcorp’s data and submitted their own drilling plans. The contest was a huge success, with entries coming from many fields outwith mining, confirming Goldcorp’s own suspicions about places to drill while also identifying new places to drill. Goldcorp has since expanded its site to over 100,000 acres, and now has reserves of more than 6.6 million ounces of gold.

I could go on, but then you wouldn’t get the enjoyment of reading the book! It’s definitely a page-turner – I think I read it in a couple of hours – and it’s certainly a book that provides a lot of energy on reading it. For that reason, this is one that I’ll be coming back to time and again.

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