Corporate Enzymes

If a company does not have at least a few 'avant' parts in its culture, it is in the process of dying. There just have to be a few visionary rule-breakers out there causing mayhem. These people take things forward.

WW - The (different) Difference

In the very late 1900s, in Woolworths, there were a few of these types of characters.

The Unix part of IT, for example, was implemented on proprietary incarnations such as (IBM's) AIX and (Sun Microsystems' - now Oracle's) Solaris. Yet, there was this one backroom-dude who saw further than anyone. He did all of his skunkworks (and he did many) using this 'fairly' new open-source thing called Linux. Linux now underpins most of the internet - and also the world's top 500 supercomputers.

While he produced some amazing work, he was also a clear and constant danger. On the 'danger' side, his magnum opus was to write a 'quick script' to delete unnecessary files from the Unix servers in the WW stores, test it in one store, deploy to all stores (without any signoff), take the afternoon off to play golf, uncontactable (as was the case in those days before pervasive mobile phones), while his scripts were merrily deleting all sorts of crucial files across the country.

Yet, without people like him, things would have moved forward slower.

In those pre-mobile-phone days, it was also still compulsory jacket-and-tie-dress-code days. Even so, another dude rocked up for his first day at work (and thereafter) in jeans and a T-shirt, impervious to the consequences. So-doing, though, he greatly contributed to the soon-thereafter modernization of the corporate dress-code.

Enzyme Management

People like these catalysts rarely (if ever) reach any great heights in corporate environments - and many of them would probably abhor the idea of such a possibility. Yet, they are corporate enzymes. They are the 'proteins that help speed up chemical reactions'.

It is our responsibility as leaders to also be the corporate chemists who must allow enough enzymes to cause enough good 'chemical' reactions while, simultaneously, not doing harm or blowing up the laboratory.

Making the right decisions requires a deep study of corporate-culture-chemistry - to be able to distinguish between the correct enzyme (on the one hand) and putting sodium in the water (on the other hand).

Examples in Art

As always, we can turn to art to for examples of what happens when one does not have enzymes.

We have, for example, in an earlier post, had a look at the auto-tuned Max Martin/melodic-math influence on music, where the melodic-math rules and algorithmic (best practice) precision overrides innovation and leads to sole-destroying sameness.

Two great counter examples are two bands that never reached any great corporate heights (uh, sorry, commercial heights): The Velvet Underground and Penguin Café Orchestra. Both groups were the musical enzymes that provided the spark for others to follow them.

This link, for example, covers some of the Velvet's Underground's importance:

"Lester Bangs, the greatest rock journalist ever, felt eternal Lower East Side musical royals the Velvet Underground were “our Beatles and Bob Dylan combined” and that “modern music begins” with them. He wasn’t wrong. They existed only for a handful of years—1965 to 1970. But five years was enough for them to create virtually everything Alternative Press covers. Punk? Noise? Indie? You name it: The Velvets are somewhere in its DNA."

And you can watch the following to get a better idea of the Penguin Café Orchestra: