Iconoclasm

What is iconoclasm? Officially an iconoclast is defined as, “someone who attacks settled beliefs or institutions.” In my words iconoclasm is simply a mental attitude that rejects the certainty of conventional beliefs and practices when they are flawed.

What is the value of iconoclasm? Standing apart from the crowd and thinking differently is probably the single most important aspect to intellectual evolution and enlightenment. Of course those are some rather fancy sounding words that basically mean everyone should think and decide for themselves. Ben Graham famously personified this belief by saying, “Have the courage of your knowledge and experience. If you have formed a conclusion from the facts and if you know your judgment is sound, act on it – even though others may hesitate or differ. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.” Word.

What is the relationship between iconoclasm and business? Some of the best business leaders have thrived because they pursued methods, cultivated corporate cultures, innovated new products and maintained steadfast attitudes that ran counter to their time and place. Two great examples are Richard Branson and Steve Jobs.

Richard Branson gave an interview in the January 2009 edition of Playboy magazine that illustrates his unconventional attitudes that have brought him mostly successes but also some failures in his life & career. Here is short excerpt:

PLAYBOY: Is your business philosophy all self-taught?
BRANSON: I never took a course in management. I’ve been fortunate to learn by experience, by making mistakes, by trying. I’ve learned every day by doing things different and new. Having so many different businesses has kept it fascinating. Every one of them helps me with the previous one, from the record business to the airline business and banking — learning, learning, learning, learning.
PLAYBOY: Is there an overall lesson on how to keep a company vital?
BRANSON: It all comes down to people. Nothing else comes close. Motivating people, bringing in the best. You assume every switchboard operator will excel, and they will. Often people make mistakes, but you allow for that, too. Praise people — like plants, they must be nurtured — and make it fun. Value them and give them the opportunity to contribute in ways that excite them. The kinds of people we employ are not afraid to take risks. If someone mucks up, they don’t get a bollocking from me. They know they’ve mucked up, and they redouble their efforts. We’re lucky because of the variety of places to go at Virgin: No one gets stagnant. When our people see an air hostess become the managing director of her own business, there is motivation. Keep it vibrant. Everything comes back to people. Nothing else. You get loyalty, enthusiasm and great service for your customers.

Enjoy the full Branson interview here.

Steve Jobs gave a fantastic speech given that touches on some important points of unconventional wisdom that served him well in life & business; one of his main takeaways was, “DON’T SETTLE”.

Also Steve Jobs also has an interview at Playboy that is from 1985 however it was only recently released as of November 2010. It is undeniably ONE OF THE BEST business interviews I have ever read; here are some thought-provoking excerpts:

PLAYBOY: Does it take insane people to make insanely great things?
JOBS: Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas. But, yeah, the people who made Mac are sort of on the edge.
PLAYBOY: What’s the difference between the people who have insanely great ideas and the people who pull off those insanely great ideas?
JOBS: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
PLAYBOY: Why is the computer field dominated by people so young? The average age of Apple employees is 29.
JOBS: It’s often the same with any new, revolutionary thing. People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things. It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.
PLAYBOY: A lot of guys in their 40s are going to be real pleased with you. Let’s move on to the other thing that people talk about when they mention Apple—the company, not the computer. You feel a similar sense of mission about the way things are run at Apple, don’t you?
JOBS: I do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers. I think Apple has a chance to be the model of a Fortune 500 company in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Ten to 15 years ago, if you asked people to make a list of the five most exciting companies in America, Polaroid and Xerox would have been on everyone’s list. Where are they now? They would be on no one’s list today. What happened? Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.
What happens in most companies is that you don’t keep great people under working environments where individual accomplishment is discouraged rather than encouraged. The great people leave and you end up with mediocrity. I know, because that’s how Apple was built. Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.

Enjoy the full Jobs interview here.