Finding Your Engineering Dandelions

In an innovation-oriented economy, it can be good for consulting firms to hire people who think differently. It's no secret that great achievers, Steve Jobs is a perfect example, rarely fit into conventional molds.  Rarely do we think in terms of designing jobs to maximize potential for particular individuals to created value.  We hate the idea of variance-widening - hiring people with "differences" - we get into the non-innovative habit of only seeing value in the types of people we are accustom to seeing.  

Consider the following from Robert D. Austin and Thorkil Sonne in the Summer issue of MIT Sloan - The Dandelion Principle: Redesigning Work for the Innovation Economy:

"But innovation calls for organizational capabilities different than efficiency.  Efficiency requires getting people and machines to mesh more smoothly; the emphasis is on parts fitting in and reducing variations around averages [this makes me think AECOM+URS].  Innovation, by contrast involves finding new and better ideas and using new processes.  Managing innovation is less about averages more about understanding outliers.  The emphasis is on increasing interesting variation, then identifying value in some of the variants."