One of the great things about what I do is that I get to meet and learn from innovators who operate so far out on the edge, who think so differently from everyone else in their field, that they are truly one-of-a-kind characters—radicals in the best sense of the word.
Exhibit A is Vernon Hill, the founder and longtime CEO of Commerce Bank, who Polly LaBarre and I wrote about in Mavericks at Work. At Commerce, Vernon and his colleagues reimagined what the experience of retail banking could be like, and they built a booming bank that sold for $8.5 billion in the process. Now he’s bringing his radical ideas to a new market—London. According to this fabulous profile in Fortune, Vernon’s MetroBank—the first new bank licensed in the UK in the last 138 years!—is shaking up the British market just like Commerce did in the US.
The piece is worth a careful read. It confirms one of the core arguments in Practically Radical: You can’t do big things if you’re content with doing things just a little better than everyone else. The game is not to out-compete your rivals. It is to unleash one-of-a-kind ideas in a world filled with me-too thinking. Go, Vernon!
