How do you actually apply all of this to running a company? For starters, consider these aspects of the business when looking for a way to add useful disorder.
Managing people: Most companies have fairly set, consistent ideas about how people should be hired and how they should get their jobs done. Messier managers, in contrast, often prefer to disrupt established systems. Burt Rutan, the highly successful aerospace maverick (and Inc.'s 2004 Entrepreneur of the Year) whose company, Scaled Composites, built the first private vehicle to bring a human into space, likes to hire people who have no experience in what they'll be doing for the company and then encourage them to find fault with everything the company does. Technical managers at software company Novell (NASDAQ:NOVL) had long clung to rigid, highly structured routines for developing software--until top management acquired a tiny off-the-wall software company called Ximian and started inviting Ximian's young former-hacker CTO to roam the buttoned-down headquarters, evangelizing about the benefits of loosening control over projects and enlisting the help of outside programmers via the Web. The change reversed a long sales slide.
Operations: It seems hard to argue with the idea that businesses should strive to standardize best practices and provide customers with a consistent, predictable experience. And yet some companies thrive on doing precisely the opposite--that is, on continually improvising and throwing customers curve balls. At a time when preschools have been adopting increasingly detailed and rigid curricula to ensure students would get a head start on preparing for standardized testing in elementary schools, Gail Leftin founded the Little Red Wagon preschools around the notion that teachers should never have a lesson plan. Instead, her teachers build the curriculum on the fly, around whatever the kids express interest in day to day. Today, Leftin is among that minority of preschool operators who have to turn parents away, and she doesn't even advertise. Edward Zaki couldn't decide what sort of restaurant he wanted to open in Montreal, so he decided not to decide. His two successful restaurants, Confusion and Vertige, mix and match various styles of décor and types of cuisine, wreaking delightful havoc with ingredients via dishes such as burnt whole wheat encased fish and cheese-stuffed grapes in ham and even serving multicourse meals in reverse order.
Strategic planning: Smart entrepreneurs put considerable effort into foreseeing trends and figuring out how to shape the company to take advantage of those trends. Or do they? It might sound nuts to suggest that companies shouldn't take the trouble to figure out what their strategies will be over the next few years, but studies suggest that strategic planning is not only a waste of time, it's actually at least as likely to hurt as help. According to University of Oregon College of Business professor William Starbuck, who has studied the question at length, strategic planning essentially requires casting a blind eye to certain key facts: The world is an unpredictable place (war, housing busts, gas price hikes, the rise of new technologies), markets are complex, competitors will counter your every move, and most managers fail to recognize the ways in which their own organizations deviate from their neat conceptions.
This happens in part because subordinates who are closer to the messy truth tend to echo their bosses' opinions rather than challenging them. Sure enough, when Starbuck looked at the performance of companies that emphasized strategic planning, he found they didn't do any better on average than companies that did less planning. Instead of fretting over strategic plans that simply set companies up to be taken by surprise, Starbuck concludes, businesses would do better to allow room for chaos and surprise in their long-range plans. Operating like this, of course, is highly messy--which is why most managers shrink from the idea.
Personal productivity: Even if you're not aware of it, you're probably putting pressure on yourself and your employees to adhere to conventional notions of daily work order, including having neat work areas, being punctual, and focusing on certain tasks. Good thing you weren't Alexander Fleming's boss. When Fleming strolled into his impressively cluttered lab after a vacation, he noticed a ragged circle of mold had formed on one of the many petri dish bacterial cultures he had left lying around. He impulsively ran some tests on it--thereby discovering penicillin. Years later, as a group of scientists took Fleming on a tour of their spotless and well-organized lab, one of them wondered aloud what amazing discoveries Fleming might have made in this sort of facility. "Not penicillin," replied Fleming.
You might even want to push employees to be messier. When Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) 's legendary chief software architect Ray Ozzie observed that the company's software developers were relying too heavily on scheduled meetings to stay in sync and swap ideas, he pushed for changes in the physical workspaces "to naturally catalyze ad hoc face time," as he put it in one memo. In other words, just getting people to bump into each other randomly can make a difference.
