23 Being Unreasonable with a Smile
Matt Ridley writes that “innovators are often unreasonable people: restless, quarrelsome, unsatisfied and ambitious”.1 In discussing Amazon at the turn of the millennium, when it was set to lose a billion dollars in the next year and was predicted to be on the point of failure, he quotes a colleague of Jeff Bezos, saying, “As usual it was Jeff against the world”, fighting his colleagues for ideas they thought were ludicrous and defying analysts who misunderstood his appetite for experiment and tolerance for failure as ineptitude.2 It wasn’t. He was being unreasonable, but only by the standards of what was then widely assumed to be reasonable.
If management is the science of getting ...
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