Food for Thought – Outsider / Insider

An idea, a book, a concept, a “matter to think about” that we share with you to open reflection, discover new subjects and lead you to (re)think from another angle.

Outsider, literally one who remains outside. Insider, on the contrary, one who knows something from the inside, a system, an organization, a market, an industry, a model, a thought. Today, these two terms have a positive value. They have even become essential ingredients of success, the decisive assets to pull one’s stake out of the game in any hyper-competitive situation. Outsider is the one who, defying market predictions and the laws of statistics, succeeds where one does not expect it. And insider, the one who, by his status as scholar, insider, or infiltrator, sees before others the flaws of a system and the way to make the best of it for the competing system. Every exceptional manager must now recruit or raise in his staff at least as many outsiders as insiders.

Outsider and insider, however, for a long time remained marks of infamy. They designated the two most miserable social conditions, men without recognition nor dignity, the proscribed, the excluded, the marginal, the unassimilable, the disaffiliated, the invisible.

Under the Ancien Régime, an outsider is a person without lineage, in a state of “genealogical misery” specifies Chantal Malabou in her investigation on power and the servile condition in France entitled Il n’y a pas eu de Révolution. He is the foreigner, the one whom medieval law called the aubain, the non-naturalized worker, one would say today immigrant, subjected to the law of bounty which at his death automatically assigned to the lords or the king the totality of his goods. And the insider is his brother of misery, foreigner on his native soil. It is the same disaffiliation that characterizes the miserable social condition of serfs and bastards: these categories group individuals who are more than poor, absolutely poor because deprived of lineage, genealogy and therefore of all right to make a will and inherit. Without being slaves, because slaves would be defined by the 1685 Black Code as “movable goods who can have nothing other than their masters”, they belong to the servile condition, even if since 1315 a decree of Louis X, son of Philip the Fair, officially abolished servitude in the royal domain by this magnificent article: “The soil of France frees any slave who touches it.” Outsider and insider, having neither recognized ancestry nor descent by power, are therefore infinitely exploitable and corvéeable. And at their death, there will remain no trace of their economic and social contribution to the kingdom’s wealth.

One understands by this brief historical reminder how much the most infamous terms can invert to become the most sought after. Outsider and insider owe their rehabilitation to the world of competition, that of sport before being that of the market. Outsider is thus first the horse which, not being part of the favorites of the race, can nevertheless win it, then, by analogy, the meaning extends to all sports disciplines before becoming the darling and the martingale of markets.
For thriller lovers, it is also the title of a great novel by Stephen King adapted into a series by HBO where the detective ends up identifying the pedophile monster because he dares to make paranormal hypotheses.

But outsider is above all, with challenger, leader, and follower, one of the four star figures of any strategic positioning. A unique way to articulate, or rather disarticulate, the relationship between the norm and the gap, articulation at the origin of all value production in a company, an organization, or an institution. The challenger is the one who challenges the norm established by the leader by seeking the sufficient gap that will allow him to differentiate. The leader, if he wants to keep his leadership, is obliged to invent a new norm ahead of the market at the risk of the great gap. The follower reproduces the norm without the slightest gap. And the outsider, because he is neither expected in the invention of the norm nor in the production of the gap, often creates surprise, innovation, rupture, by freeing himself precisely from the norm as well as from the gap.
It is the Underdog effect, so named by the Harvard Business Review which has shown that individuals from whom little was expected had more chances to create unexpected things. At the school of talents, we too often forget those from whom we think a priori that little is to be expected…

References
Harvard Business Review / Underdog Effect: When low expectations increase performance
Guillaume Le Blanc / L’invisibilité sociale and L’insurrection des vies minuscules
Judith Butler / Le vivable et l’invivable
Chantal Malabou / Il n’y a pas eu de Révolution