HR professionals prefer people who conform. If they could man their shop floors with a thousand identical Bharat Kumars, they would love to do so. Even at senior executive levels, where diversity is necessary for the good of the company, clones rule. When you meet a CEO at a conference, you will often find him supported by a clutch of shining-morning-face MBA types. They breed them by the hundreds at the B-schools.

In India, MNC subsidiaries have traditionally chosen to play safe. They hire on certain parameters laid down by their parent. Even though there is flexibility in this, they err on the side of caution. A maverick often makes waves, most of the time of the wrong kind.

Professionally-managed Indian companies (the few that really fall into that category) have taken their cue from the MNCs. It is only in family-run businesses that mavericks are tolerated. Here too, it is not because of any different thinking from the HR department. The presence or absence of mavericks depends entirely on the CEO.

There is this story about former Tisco chairman Russi Mody. Travelling to Calcutta from Jamshedpur by road one day, he was accosted at a level crossing by a very tall beggar. He promptly gave him a job. The reason: he had, a while earlier, given a job to a midget. And he wanted to put the two in the same department so that they could be seen functioning side by side. (Of course, it is all very politically incorrect. But, then, Mody never gave a damn for the opinions of others.)

Yet mavericks are the ones who make the dramatic breakthroughs. In sales, they will trouble you the whole year and then bring one order that more than compensates.

In The Maverick Way: Profiting from the Power of the Corporate Misfit, author Richard Cheverton describes how Kimberly-Clark CEO Darwin Smith supported mavericks and how they, in turn, changed a stodgy miller of pulp and paper into a consumer products giant. The “implicit, informal and underground set of people, practices, and relationships that stimulate innovations which provide the basis for corporate renewal” (what Cheverton calls the Maverick Way) is vital for every organisation.

In Corporate Voodoo: Business Principles for Mavericks and Magicians, authors Rene Carayol and David Firth draw on a Harry Potter analogy. Run-of-the-mill employees, they say, are Muggles (the ordinary folk of the Potter world as contrasted with witches and wizards). The Muggles are good for day-to-day operations. You need mavericks to take that next step forward.

Yet mavericks, by their very nature, are disruptive. They behave like prima donnas. “How employers think about the trade-off between talent and disruptive behaviour depends on how important they believe teamwork and morale are in the organisation’s culture,” says Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli, in an article in Knowledge@Wharton. “If you have a star sales person who’s difficult but works away from the office, you might be willing to tolerate a high level of difficulty with that guy because it doesn’t have much effect on the performance of the organisation. But where teamwork matters, you want to tolerate less of that.”

The bottomline is that if you are a maverick you will go places. But only in the right sort of company. And you better have the talent. Otherwise, you will be out on your ear before the day is out.

MAVERICKS vs MUGGLES

The key differences between rebels (Mavericks) and corporate conformists (Muggles)

Mavericks have a healthy attitude to failure, seeing it as rich in learning and opportunity.

Muggles engineer their efforts to avoid failure and thus compress their lives into what is known and predictable.

Mavericks engage fully with life. They know that nothing ? failure, success ? exists except as a point of view. They are therefore grateful for the lessons of any experience. And they move on.

Muggles are afraid of other human beings. And they hide that fear behind a show of power. The history of organisations has been the history of subjugation, conformance and control, not because of any understanding that this produces the most efficient use of the human resource, but from a fear of what might be produced without such confining approaches.

Source: Corporate Voodoo: Business Principles for Mavericks and Magicians, by Rene Carayol and David Firth