The creative power of misfits | WorkLife with Adam Grant from TED Talks Daily in Podcasts.- One of the challenges of success is that the habits that got you there are hard to break. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? Because nothing stays exactly the same. New rules are created. Old pathways are closed. Environments change. Competition evolves. What worked perfectly 10 or 20 years ago may not work at all today.

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen explains how this happens in business. Large, “incumbent” businesses are practically programmed to service large existing customer bases with modest innovations to already good products. They don’t have the capacity for substantial change. And that’s why disruptive innovation usually comes from smaller companies.

I’ve made the case that large and successful businesses can also create disruptive innovations. But to do so, they need to create a separate micro-culture of innovators and (as Adam Grant calls them) misfits to do the thinking that the employees of the incumbent company cannot.