Wal-Mart: Leveraging Kmart’s Advertising Budget
Never one to stand on ego, Walton leveraged his competitors, customers, associates, and partners, learning everything he could from them. In fact, he spent much of his time at his competitors' stores, gleaning retail secrets on pricing, display, and merchandising. During Wal-Mart's early days, Kmart became his role model:

"I was in their stores constantly because they were the laboratory, and they were better than we were. I spent a heck of a lot of my time wandering through their stores talking to their people and trying to figure out how they did things."

But Walton did more than just learn from Kmart, he leveraged the strength of their marketing department. In the 1980s, when Kmart was aggressively advertising weekly specials to pull customers into its stores, Wal-Mart refused to get into an advertising battle but offered similar specials. In addition, some Wal-Mart stores began posting Kmart's weekly specials at the front of their stores, promising to match or beat Kmart's prices.

Medtronic: Nurturing the Maverick Within the Corporation
"You want to have some people who are mavericks, who are out ahead five or six years. They are a terrible problem to manage. If you don't have them, you'd better grow them because that's what you need to keep the company out ahead. You've got to listen to mavericks. You don't let them rule, but you've got to have a system that at least allows them to be heard, and to have their opportunity to try and convince other engineers that they are on the right track. You've got to have products in the drawer that aren't authorized. You've somehow got to encourage people to try some other things. We have a system [at Medtronic] whereby if somebody has an idea that seems like it's within our province, we'll give him or her $50,000 to try it."
--Earl Bakken, Founder, Medtronic

Bakken believes that one of the best ways to manage people, mavericks or not, is to listen, even when listening isn’t easy. By offering a sympathetic ear to mavericks and using great imagination, effective leaders can turn their wild-card ideas to great benefit. At Medtronic, Bakken created the Bakken Society to honor the mavericks who made great scientific and technical contributions to the company.

Southwest Airlines (SWA): Maverick Human Resources
At SWA, the management team is interested in the whole person, which includes a person's family and personal issues. Kelleher likes to tell people at SWA that: "You can be whole. You don't have to be fragmented. You don't have to be segmented. It's the whole person we like, it's the whole person we hired, it's the whole person we want to give freedom to and that's it."

SWA is very aware of the whole person, it is the recognized leader in the airline industry for its scheduling flexibility, allowing front line employees to trade shifts and juggle schedules to meet family obligations without sacrificing work commitments. Kelleher sums it up this way:

"We really exert ourselves to help out with family problems. In other words, we exert ourselves to help employees with problems they have outside the workplace unconnected with work, but we also exert ourselves to help their families."

Many companies talk about employees as an extended family, but at SWA it's really true. The result is a high performance workforce that competitors are hard-pressed to imitate.

Grameen Bank: No-Punishment Loans
Grameen exists in a counter-culture of its own creation, focused not on making money but on helping people get out of poverty. While profit is a necessary condition of success, the officers at Grameen Bank use profit only as a measure of efficiency. If borrowers are unable to repay loans, the bankers at Grameen focus on assisting borrowers in overcoming problems, not punishing them. This unconventional approach springs from the belief that each person should be given the necessary tools and assistance to control his or her destiny.

One of Grameen's major successes has been the discipline of its borrowers in repaying loans in spite of the regular cataclysms, natural disasters, and personal tragedies that occur. To achieve such success, Grameen has a policy of never canceling a loan because of such tragedies. Rather, bankers will restructure any loan into a very long-term loan, even if it reduces the repayment amount to half a penny each week. Such discipline helps the borrower maintain a sense of self-reliance and confidence.