The Outsiders

Introduction

An Intelligent Iconoclasm

It is impossible to produce superior performance unless you do something different.

—John Templeton

The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande uses the term positive deviant to describe unusually effective performers in the field of medicine. To Gawande, it is natural that we should study these outliers in order to learn from them and improve performance.¹

Surprisingly, in business the best are not studied as closely as in other fields like medicine, the law, politics, or sports. After studying Henry Singleton, I began, with the help of a talented group of Harvard MBA students, to look for other cases where one company handily beat both its peers and Jack Welch (in terms of relative market performance). It turned ...