A celebration of the Maverick

Back in 2005, I wrote a short article for StyleVision, the trend collective set up in Nice, France, and the organizer of a number of inspiring off season roundtables at the Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat. In that article, I celebrated the Maverick as a protagonist of growth and progress within complex organisations and in society. From the unbranded cattle owned by Samuel A. Maverick (1803–1870) to Susan Sontag’s essay about Walter Benjamin, “Under the Sign of Saturn”, the notion of “maverick” has fascinated me for a long time. Today, following the steps of the inimitable Steve Jobs’ 2005 Commencement Speech in Stanford, I will present three short stories, however anecdotal, to plastically sketch a picture the roots of my love for mavericks and what I have learnt from them: Dr. Howard Moskowitz; Dr. Annalisa Melara; and Harvard alumnus, August De Los Reyes (1970–2020), and I will try to answer the question: what makes a maverick?

Firstly, Dr. Howard Moskowitz went from a late 1960s Ph.D. in Psychophysics, to the 1995 Parlin Prize as a marketing leader and market research innovator. I met Howard in the mid 2000’s and I had the privilege to share with him authorship, research, and personal friendship. As a Harvard scholar and a Harvard Club frequent brunch visitor, he might have chosen any career in corporate or public sector management. Because Howard always held a real talent for algorithms, data, and anything analytical in the positivist side of science, hence a passport for business success. However, Howard’s is also embodied in a less rational, more visionary side of him: an avid audience of opera’s and a writer of poetry himself, his inventiveness led him to independent business and intellectual pursuits as a writer, most notably with the Wharton Business Publishing title: “Selling Blue Elephants”, with Dr. Alex Gofman, presenting their Rule Developing Experimentation methodology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule-developing_experimentation). The thing is that Moskowitz did not hesitate to bring science in the most traditional epistemology to activate actionable change in the world, from the formulas of pasta sauce to his grand vision of how statistics might enable change in the Middle East. Instead of enjoying the ivory tower of privilege that his doctoral status might have naturally provided to his professional life, Howard became the protagonist of his own quest of cross-fertilization across scientific and design traditions. Malcom Gladwell, iconic author of “The Tipping Point”, chose him as the protagonist of his 2004 TED Talk, seen by nearly 9.000.000 and available as a transcript in 37 languages (https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_choice_happiness_and_spaghetti_sauce?language=en). What strikes me in Howard Moskowitz is the ability to indulge in crossovers between his rigorous mathematic mind and his inclination towards the great storytelling of his family culture. In the current academic world where positivists and constructivists seem not to be able to reconcile for the love of science, Dr. Moskowitz shines a light in engaging in dialogs from his clear statistic soul, towards the real world he always had the ambition to impact, by immersing into real life. Rejecting dogmatism and embracing one’s own vision of what the world could be, the first qualities that make mavericks great to my eyes.

Secondly, as a central piece in my tryptich, Dr. Annalisa Malara, on occasion of the publication of her first book, printed by the prestigious Italian publisher, Longanesi, not traslated into English yet: “In scienza e coscienza”(https://www.longanesi.it/libri/annalisa-malara-in-scienza-e-coscienza-9788830456358/). On 21/02/2021, Italian journalist Andrea Cuomo on the conservative Il Giornale (https://www.ilgiornale.it/news/leroina-controvoglia-tampone-stata-incoscienza-quanto-vorrei-1925566.htm)l, defined Dr. Malara: “An involuntary hero”, introducing her in an interview about her 20/02/2020 crucial contribution to the Covid-19 pandemic war that Italy has been fighting since that day. Born in the 1980s when I had my indecisive teenage, brilliantly graduated in Pavia, then knighted for special merits by the the President of the Italian Republic in June 2020, until that very day of February 2020 Dr. Malara had been just one of the fine Intensive Therapy specialists who work daily in Northern Italian hospitals. Lombardy has one of the best welfare and healthcare systems in Europe, where the level of empathy and personal quality of relationships by doctors somehow compensates the beaurocratic complexity of its mixed public / private system. I assume that the small hospital set to service the rich provincial area of Codogno, where Dr. Malara was working, makes no exception. What made Dr. Malara into a national heroine, was instead an exceptional act of somehow slightly insubordinate deviation from the official protocols set by the Ministry of Health, namely the directional guidelines to only test for Covid-19 infection those patients who might have been exposed to direct contact in or with travelers from Wuhan or China or Asia. The mandatory procedures were clear and Covid-19 testing to be administrated solely in those clinical cases. And yet, Dr. Malara observed how a young, athletic patient, Mattia, showed persistent symptoms comparable with covid-19, without having had any such direct contacts with Asian travellers or places. I like to think of Dr. Malara in her office, in front of her computer screen, or perhaps walking through the ward where Mattia’s lungs were rapidly unable to support his soon-to-be father’s life. I wonder if she made her decision to test him by serendipity or perhaps if it was the paralogical conclusion of her analysis, however deviating from everything we, in Europe, knew and expected until then. I have lived through the earlier Asian SARS epidemics while having business and family in Asia, and it always struck me how a viral outburst is invariably something that happens “elsewhere”. Even when Covid-19 took its toll of Northern Italy, to other European countries remained as long as possible an external problem, due to Italian peculiar conditions. As an experiment catalyst, Covid-19 demonstrated how little Europeans care about each other, and much worse. However, in whatever room she was that day, Dr. Malara did care enough to be willing to deviate all protocols, and test Mattia. I remember it was a Friday , when I heard the news on the Radio 24 morning show, that Covid-19 was in Italy, and in the next hours, everything changed. Mattia, or Patient 1, was saved by Dr. Malara and her team. Somehow he had to be saved, to give hope to an isolated nation in the first ever European lockdown since WWII. In her interview, Dr. Malara describes how only her resilience, with her team and colleagues, drove her through the dark days when patients on ICU’s were stable in their assisted respiratory mechanics, not reacting to any pharmaceutic intervention. I communicated with her a couple of times, on LinkedIn, at the time when she already surged to the spotlight of national media. She always answered swiftly, with short and somehow simple sentences, that stroke me as a sign of modesty and wisdom. Deviating from protocols and being able to reject the process when its application leads to no positive outcome, is definitely a maverick quality that Dr. Malara displayed following her intuition on 20/02/2020. And also, another maverick trait might be identified in her persistence and resilience in treating patience without seeing immediate or even expected improvement of their condition. The fact that she maintained her kindness even in communicating with total strangers on LinkedIn is instead undoubtedly a testimony to her own personal qualities, that I suspect largely exceeding her however remarkable courage.

Lastly, I have to bring into this article the lightness and the smile of one of the kindest and most intense creative minds I have met in my professional life, August De Los Reyes (https://www.fastcompany.com/90590698/inclusive-design-pioneer-august-de-los-reyes-dies-of-covid-19-complications), whose troubled yet bright life was abruptly ended by Covid-19. I worked and wrote with August, as well as with Anton Andrews, also at Microsoft now (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/19487169/2004/15/1) during my best years at Philips Design, when he was on my team exploring the future of advertising beyond mass media in partnership with Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam. In the years of intense work we shared, I cannot recall to ever heard him raise his voice or even being cross. August used to tell me, in the friendly American musicality of his voice, how getting into Microsoft was harder than getting into Harvard, and he got into both, becoming the architect of Xbox and a leading global figure in redesigning inclusive design. He actually invited me for a potential job at Microsoft and was my host in Seattle for a week, in the early 2000’s. I did not settle at Microsoft and in many ways, I did not settle at all whereas he seemed always settled wherever he was, from Samsung to Pinterest, with a smile naturally rounding his face at all times. I remember him in a VW New Beetle, driving back home after dropping me at my hotel in Redmond and that is my last memory of him, except a limited correspondence over the years and what I read about his work. In the mid 2010s, an ordinary domestic incident resulted in a lesion in his back and a wrong procedure carried out at the Overlake Hospital Medical Center in Bellevue, Washington, resulted in his permanent impairment. The resulting case was settled with a USD 20 millions transaction and with a design project that August demanded as part of the reparations, namely the redesign of healthcare processes to prevent miscommunication to ever result in the damage he suffered (https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/19/a-hospitals-mistake-paralyzes-a-designer-he-got-20m-and-an-unusual-promise.html). Also from here but for sure based on the gentle strength of his exceptional sensibility, August, senior son of immigrants from Manila, became a global thought leader in advocating the power of design for inclusion and inclusiveness, redefining how diversity leads a notion of design for a better world. He left behind a beloved husband, a beloved family and the love of a design community that he moved to rethink goals and strategies of our work, by wit, homour and kindness. While the circumstances of his life might have deprived him of physical mobility, his agile mind and caring temper enabled him to fuel his vision of a better world, by design. And this, I believe, is the third trait of the mind of the maverick, who excels at moulding their everyday challenges, no matter how terrible, into the pursuit of their ultimate vision.

So, how can you describe or even identify a maverick? It is the one who rejects dogmatism. It’s the one who deviates from bureaucratic protocols and dares to experiment in search of a solution that works in the real world. It is the one who smiles or talks with a soft spoken voice or acts out of kindness and love, while the world shouts and shuts up possibilities or closes borders. The maverick might be a token of admired conversations but lately, mavericks are not much beloved, because mavericks challenge the status quo. By way of paradox, the increasing digitalisation of everyday life comes at the expenses of an increasing standardisation of behaviours, norms and values. Yes, as Rem Koolhaas sharply envisioned it in 2014, a smart world might move us all beyond the ideals of equality, fraternity, solidarity of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment project, towards an aseptic and conforming reality where security, comfort, sustainability numb us all and void our lives (https://www.archdaily.com/576480/rem-koolhaas-asks-are-smart-cities-condemned-to-be-stupid).

My generation, that was so brilliantly grasped in its essence by Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X”, was the last generation to be born and raised in the analogue world and the first generation to go through the great promises of the first dot.com revolution, back in the 1990s. Perhaps even more than Coupland’s vivid novel, the Apple “Think Different” commercial by TBWA/Chiat Day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpzvwkR1RYU) celebrated the world how it was before 9/11, before the 2008 crisis, and before Covid-19. It was a world of possibilities. In the dark days of Covid-19 and with its political and economic impact, a world where dystopias of digital control sometimes penetrate into popular culture and social media, it is the legacy and vision of mavericks that might, once again, “…push the human race forward. Because: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”. That is about the “job description” that all mavericks secretly share across the globe, with a smile on their face and with lightness in their heart.