Companies fire employees for these personality traits, but maybe they should be getting bonuses

Innovation is the engine that powers the economy, mints unicorns, and billionaires, and gives us brands that have become verbs: Google, Uber, Zoom. Just about everybody in every business wants to be an innovator—or, at least, knows the First Commandment of modern business: innovate or disappear.

While corporate leaders know innovation is their lifeblood, many don’t really know how to do it. Linda Bernardi, a technologist, entrepreneur, speaker, and coauthor of the books The Inversion Factor: How to Thrive in the IoT Economy and Provoke, says when she takes questions from her audiences, half are from eager but frustrated senior executives pleading to know the secret formula. “They ask me, ‘Linda, how do I innovate?’” she tells us. “It’s shocking that a way of thinking that should be the core of many companies’ success is still such a mystery.”

Truthfully, it’s no mystery. The corporate world has always been a stew of contradictions. Most leaders are preoccupied with fit, the idea that hiring folks whose personality and values click into their culture like Legos is the key to building a tribe of warrior-poets who’ll lift them to a billion-dollar market cap.

Meanwhile, many of those C-suiters talk like they have Apple’s “Think Different” ad copy about rebels and troublemakers tattooed on their forearms. They ache to be swashbuckling, Branson-esque visionaries who define eras, transmogrify markets, and squirrel away enough stock options to buy a private island while they’re at it.   

The bottom line is that companies are desperate to become more innovative. In the recent BCG Most Innovative Companies survey, the share of companies reporting innovation as a top-three priority jumped ten percentage points to 75 percent, the largest year-over-year increase in the fifteen years of the survey. But if you’re leading one of those organizations, you might feel trapped between conformity and innovation. You can’t have both, but which do you choose? 

In more than fifteen years of running our award-winning branding agency, we’ve noticed a pattern. Organizations that consistently display fearless creativity and set the pace in their industry typically have leaders who don’t play well with others. They’re obsessive, oppositional, audacious, and socially maladroit. However, they’re also wired to see beyond the limitations of the present, challenge conventional wisdom, and break what should be broken. For all their quirks and sharp elbows, they approach problems and solutions with blinding originality. 

We call such people the Rare Breed. That’s who to choose. 

The Rare Breed

Rare Breeds value truth and individuality over conformity. They are out of the ordinary and outspoken, unapologetically moving in one direction while the herd moves in the other. Rare Breeds are the ones who realize visions other people insist are impossible. They rebel against business-as-usual and never let “the way things are” get in the way of “the way things could be.” Their nerve and imagination open up rich veins of opportunity for others. Although they can make some people uncomfortable by saying what others won’t, Rare Breeds also show up every day as the highest, most impactful, most honest versions of themselves, inspiring those around them to do the same. 

Rare Breeds are people whose defining traits parents, teachers, mentors, and bosses have long derided as vices. Instead, we reframe them as virtues, and in our book, Rare Breed: A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous, and Different, we identify seven of them:

Rebellious. People with zero tolerance for what doesn’t work, who push against authority, precedent, and the word of experts to see how hard they push back. 
Audacious. Brimming over with hubris and the sense that they have capabilities others lack, they’ll gleefully dare the impossible, especially if you tell them it’s impossible.
Obsessed. They’re the ones who work 72 hours without sleep, scribble equations on the walls of the shower, agonize over punctuation…and create greatness. 
Hot-Blooded. People with passions that run so deep nothing else matters. They’re activists, champions, avengers, and people you don’t want to cross. 
Weird. Nerds. Geeks. Habitués of maker fairs, comic cons, and silent film festivals. They see the world from odd angles and through strange filters and are often brilliant. 
Hypnotic. People with disconcerting levels of charisma, who find it easy to sway and spellbind others up to—and sometimes, beyond—the point of manipulation.  
Emotional. Wearing their hearts on their sleeves, these are the empaths, the ones who weep at everyone’s pain but also find joy in the small things. 

Rare Breeds power innovation because they’re motivated by different things than the typical employee. They care less about fitting in, climbing the ladder, or avoiding criticism than they do about being true to themselves. Yes, they want to be appreciated and to belong, because they’re human, but if being part of the tribe means pretending to be something they’re not, they’ll ditch the tribe.  

This makes Rare Breeds your greatest assets, because they’ll approach design questions, technical problems, marketing messaging, or financial conundrums from a direction no one else in your organization will even think to consider. They’re your secret weapon. 

The Rare Breed organization

But the real value of Rare Breeds may lie in their power to transform organizations with what we call the Rare Breed Mindset. If you’ve been a conventional, by-the-book thinker all your life, you can’t just snap your fingers and start thinking like a changemaker. It’s frustrating and it limits how innovative you can be. But if you can’t develop a disruptor’s mentality, you can always import it by bringing Rare Breeds into your organization.