Don't consider yourself deviant? Well, that just may be a career breaker. Odds are the idea or product that will transform your business or industry tomorrow is out there right now, hiding in the shadows of the Fringe, raw, messy, untamed, and just waiting to be exploited. Trapping, taming, and marketing it is the key to burying your competition and staying ahead of your market.
Deviance is nothing more than a marked separation from the norm and is the source of innovation, the kind of breakthrough thinking that creates new markets and tumbles traditional ones. Positive deviation is an inexhaustible font of new ideas, products, and services. It's the source of all creative thinking and dynamic new market development and ultimately the basis of all incremental profit.
The Deviant's Advantage describes how deviance proceeds along a traceable trajectory from the Fringe, where it originates but has zero commercial potential; to the Edge, where word of mouth creates a limited audience; to the Realm of the Cool, where the buzz and market momentum really start to build; to the Next Big Thing, where demand is honed and intensifies; finally landing at Social Convention, the heart of the mass market.
Looking for the next big idea for your business? Then it's past time to quit staring at the Social Convention for inspiration and start scouring the Fringes of society. Tomorrow's breakthrough concept is lurking out there right now, in the mind of a deviant individual. Your choice is simple: find it and exploit it, or be buried by those who do.
"Where do breakthrough ideas come from? Where do you look to find the next great business concept, the next box-office bonanza, the next Broadway smash, the next social revolution? As this fun, insightful, and brilliant book makes clear, if you want to be ahead of the curve of change, you've got to spend time on the fringes of society. The spot-on lesson: Don't be afraid of deviants -- embrace them! They are creating the future before it arrives for the rest of us."
ALAN M. WEBBER, FOUNDING EDITOR, FAST COMPANY
"Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker will challenge both the right and left sides of your brain. The opportunity to harness genius is all around you but requires dramatic stretching of peripheral vision to bring the fringe into focus. If you haven't yet made the observation that everything, including time itself, is accelerating, you most certainly will after reading The Deviant's Advantage. But you'll also be challenged to examine new dimensions of your potential for personal development by coming to understand that business doesn't exist in isolation. It's part of our overall culture. A new breed of leaders is embracing the apparent contradictions of our society and harnessing what seem like emerging aberrant concepts to shape the future."
RANDY J. ROSE, PRESIDENT, ENERGIZER BATTERY, INC.
