Sidebar: Advice to Corporate Leaders

You may not like it. You may not be comfortable with it. But there it is: The devox is alive and well, and you need to deal with it. Sure, deviants make you nervous. You may not like them, but you need them! Remember what Vito Corleone advised in The Godfather: "Keep your friends close but your enemies closer." Good advice from a deviant about how to deal with deviants. Here are 10 more tips.

1. Consider the metaphor of the windmill: You can harness raw power, but you can't control it.
2. Stop firing risk takers when their ideas don't work out.
3. Unless you are yourself a deviant, quit hiring and promoting people who are exactly like you.
4. Fire Cool Hunters and other cultural interpreters. Odds are, they don't get it. And if they do get it, by the time they communicate it to you, the real opportunity will be gone.
5. Hire artists, clowns, or other disrupters to come in and challenge your corporate environment.
6. Hire a corporate anthropologist to analyze how tolerant your organization is of deviants and other innovators.
7. Once the anthropologist leaves, hire a shaman to drive out the evil spirits of conformity.
8. Encourage your employees to get out of their professional and personal comfort zones.
9. Arrange corporate field trips and learning journeys to see examples of profitable deviants at work.
10. Relax. Resistance to deviance is futile. And acceptance of deviance is anything but fatal.

Sidebar: 5 Things You Need to Know About the Devox

1. Innovations -- from products, services, ideas, and even celebrities move from the fringe to the center.
2. The distance from the fringe of society to the center of the social convention has been compressed, and the pace of making the trip has been accelerated.
3. Social convention has eroded to the point where it no longer authoritatively defines reality for society.
4. Historically, the fringe was defined by the mainstream. Today, the fringe defines what the mainstream looks like.
5. Most companies that say they are seeking "the edge" of fashion, technology, or consumer trends are, in fact, picking up on deviance well after it has begun its journey to the center.