Break your own rules

This second of three articles by Bolko von Oetinger, a senior vice president and director of the Strategy Institute for the Boston Consulting Group, continues the distillation of ideas in the book, A Passion for Ideas: How Innovators Create the New and Shape Our World, edited by Heinrich von Pierer and von Oetinger (Purdue University Press, 2002). The book includes interviews with, and articles by successful innovators from many areas: business, politics, the arts, the sciences, psychology, education, advertising, architecture, universities, and schools. von Oetinger has blended comments from the experts with his own experience to offer five patterns of behavior needed for corporate innovation. This article provides many quotations from the book while presenting the third behavioral pattern: since our rules limit our actions, we have to break our own rules.