There’s a common narrative, in contemporary American culture, of a bunch of misfits banding together to outcompete the legitimate but wasteful incumbents. Think of the protagonist’s scrappy training in Rocky or The Karate Kid (vs the wealthy antagonist’s fancy training regime), or even in Twister, where the bad-guy tornado scientists drive fancy new black SUVs, while the good-guy tornado scientists drive a beat-up old pickup truck and get their tornado-scanners to fly by cutting up old aluminum cans for wings. Or Star Wars, where the Empire is glossy and standardized and uses gigantic powerful ships and the Rebels are diverse and quirky and just sort of doing the thing. Or Moneyball, especially analogous to college admissions, where the bad guys use expensive talent scouts and money, and the good guys have a small amount of money (for a baseball team) and one guy who knows some statistics.
The trope currently seems to be in the process of being ground into dust by postmodern marketers with no taste, but it was originally a coherent thing, and seems to be talking about the sort of problem you’re discussing. This implies a strategic narrative where the normative response to entrenched rent-extracting meritocracies is not to try to win acceptance by them / change minds, but organize a separate system full of misfits to actually outperform. At least, according to the poets and bards of our age. To some extent we can think of Abraham as having done this, as well as the various founding cultures of the US.
I think this is also the narrative of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma.
There’s a common narrative, in contemporary American culture, of a bunch of misfits banding together to outcompete the legitimate but wasteful incumbents. Think of the protagonist’s scrappy training in Rocky or The Karate Kid (vs the wealthy antagonist’s fancy training regime), or even in Twister, where the bad-guy tornado scientists drive fancy new black SUVs, while the good-guy tornado scientists drive a beat-up old pickup truck and get their tornado-scanners to fly by cutting up old aluminum cans for wings. Or Star Wars, where the Empire is glossy and standardized and uses gigantic powerful ships and the Rebels are diverse and quirky and just sort of doing the thing. Or Moneyball, especially analogous to college admissions, where the bad guys use expensive talent scouts and money, and the good guys have a small amount of money (for a baseball team) and one guy who knows some statistics.
The trope currently seems to be in the process of being ground into dust by postmodern marketers with no taste, but it was originally a coherent thing, and seems to be talking about the sort of problem you’re discussing. This implies a strategic narrative where the normative response to entrenched rent-extracting meritocracies is not to try to win acceptance by them / change minds, but organize a separate system full of misfits to actually outperform. At least, according to the poets and bards of our age. To some extent we can think of Abraham as having done this, as well as the various founding cultures of the US.
I think this is also the narrative of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma.
(Cross-posted this comment from Katja’s blog)