History says it. The disruption in automobile industry wasn’t from Ford, the disruption in travel & renting industry wasn’t from the CEO of Hilton, the disruption in phone industry wasn’t from Nokia or Motorola and so on..
Being inexperienced in something gives you the liberty to question anything. There are no rules. One of India’s famous directors, Mani Ratnam once told about a shot in his film. He never went to a film school and didn’t receive any formal training from any director. In one of his movies, he had asked the cameraman to tilt the camera and put it in a weird position. The cameraman (an experienced one) said that’s not possible and it doesn’t work like that. He insisted on doing it and the shot came out beautifully. The cameraman later asked Mani on how he learnt this technique, to which he replied “Is this a technique? I don’t know about any techniques. I just thought it might be an interesting shot”
The same holds true while building a company. It’s essential that the teams working on different operations should interact with each other. The best sales idea might come from a developer and the best way to plan out task deadlines and schedule might come from a marketing person.. who knows. They have no rules.
Unlearning
*This leads to an interesting aspect of “unlearning”. It essentially means if you have to grow fast in your role and invent something new, you will have to be willing to unlearn what you already know. And it’s going to be damn hard to do that because the question that’ll popup immediately is, *this has been working for decades, how can we change it? At that instant, I point them to this video.
*Lame or disruption
*So, why don’t we hire a team full of inexperienced people? we can disrupt the disruption. The risk in all these new ideas is it can either be a completely innovative one or can be totally lame.
*Powerful team
*In essence, a powerful team would consist of a right mix of experience and young blood, with every department interacting with another on a regular basis, and everyone willing to unlearn what they already know.