Consultants (and “futurists”) Mathews and Wacker present a book about cashing in on weird ideas. Defining deviance as “something or someone operating in a defined measure away from the norm,” the authors examine the transformation that takes fringe ideas-such as jazz, holistic medicine, and even personal computing-into mass markets. They use examples such as Virgin mogul Richard Branson (whom they call a “poster boy” for deviance, because of his notion that everyday people should be able to have a lifestyle that would normally be closed to them) to show the process of taking a peripheral idea mainstream and applying it to one’s business, even addressing the inevitable occurrence of the once-fringe idea becoming cliché. Although laden with trendy made-up words, e.g., “devox” and “prescreen,” Mathews’s and Wacker’s intriguing book is a fun mix of business savvy and social commentary that will surely appeal to the Fast Company crowd.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Editor’s Note: read interview with the authors at
Ryan Mathews, Watts Wacker
Subject: Miscellaneous
