The Misfit Economy, lessons in creativity from pirates, hackers, gangsters and other informal entrepreneurs

By @SimonCocking 

Review of the Misfit Economy written by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips published by Simon & Schuster

This is a fun book to read, albeit to be taken with a pinch of salt. If you’re looking for an attempt to get beyond the traditional truisms and oft repeated near fortune cookie observations then this is good book to read. Too many people become successful and then feel the need to bestow business lessons onto others, despite the fact that they may just have been plain lucky, fortunate, or surrounded by really talented people who compensated for their own failings.

In this context the Misfit Economy is an enjoyable and thought provoking read. When you invoke Somali Pirates for examples of adaptive businesses then you know that the authors are working hard to look beyond traditional business cases for interesting examples of innovative business ideas. Africa after all is a vastly creative and innovative place for business ingenuity, and the rest of the world needs to spend more time considering African solutions to business problems.

The slight skepticism about some of the case studies comes from the feeling that the common anti social elements of Somali Pirates and people serving 20 year sentences for murder may actually make them more similar than different to some of our traditional, celebrated, business leaders. The challenge is to be successful without destroying and killing everyone in your way.

The chapter titles include hustle, copy, hack, provoke and pivot. These are all good concepts to discuss, and ones that many have used to achieve successful results. In many ways this is a good book to read, not for a blueprint of how to make your own business successful, rather to remind you to keep looking at the world around you, and observing how other people are doing things differently. It was an enjoyable read, you might get some inspiration from it, and I am curious now what camel’s milk tastes like.

For more details about the book see here

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