In this video clip, originally recorded in February 2014, Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner interviews author Malcolm Gladwell during the Motley Fool member event, FoolFest. Gladwell shares some insights from his book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, including some key traits of innovators.
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Malcolm Gladwell: Some wonderful work has been done on innovators recently and they looked at what is the prototypical profile of an entrepreneur innovator leader? The argument is, the most obvious one is that they are open, meaning they are creative. That goes without saying. You have to be able to be someone who considers all. The second thing is that you must be conscientious in the psychological sense of that word. There are five basic character traits. Conscientiousness is one of them. Are you someone who can follow through on your ideas? Now right away we have an interesting situation here because there are lots of people who are open and there are lots of people who are conscientious. Those that have both those traits are rare. I can find in any coffee shop in Brooklyn lots of creative people who can't finish their screenplay. I can also find in any law firm in America tons and tons of conscientious people, who we don't want to think outside the box, we want them inside the box. They're not creative. But that overlap is rare, and then add to the third most important one which is disagreeable, which is you cannot be someone who requires the approval of others in order to do what you intend to do. That's crucial and that's the hardest of the three because we're hardwired as human beings to want the approval of our peers.
I always remember, when I was writing my book Blink, I hung out with a guy who studied marriages and he was talking about the one emotion that a marriage cannot survive in the face of is contempt. Because contempt is the emotion of exclusion. If your spouse argues with you, they are including you, they're saying I care about you enough to want to work this out. When they are contemptuous toward you they're saying, "I'm done with you." As human beings we need that approval so much that that can end a marriage. Well, the really great entrepreneurs at some key moment, or innovators or leaders at some key moment as they are putting forth their vision, need to be disagreeable. They need to not need that approval. Because the one thing we know is that there is always a moment in the birth of any great idea when the consensus is it's crazy. Find me a transformative idea that was not denounced and criticized at some key moment during its gestation.
