Do you think that Bill Gates thinks there’s a box? Or Warren Buffet? Do you think that Muhammad Ali thought there was a box? What about Sir Richard Branson? How do you think Tiger Woods or Roger Federer would feel if they thought that they had to operate inside ‘the box’.

Very often, I hear business leaders – I mean ‘normal’ business leaders, not the people whose names we all know – talk about ‘thinking outside the box’. This phrase is frequently used in business, whether it relates to problem solving or innovation. Lots of business people talk about it – very few ever rise to what is in fact not much of a challenge at all. What very few of them have realised is that there is no box!

Only special people, unusually successful people – in other words, not normal people – realise this fact. That’s why we all know their names – they stand head and shoulders above the rest of us.

There is no box – other than the box we create for ourselves. From a very early age, society and education fashion a box for us – and because we’re all in the box together, it seems OK. “Get yourself a good education” (Bill Gates dropped out of university) or “Get yourself a good job” (Richard Branson left school when he was sixteen and started Student magazine).

When you do get yourself a good job, you’re taught how to be a “team player” – that really means “Don’t do anything that would upset anyone else on the team, play by the rules and, for God’s sake, don’t do anything unusual or innovative.” And, of course, organisations have a “corporate culture” – that means “this is how we do things around here – conform”.

So the box – that you’ve effortlessly slid into – is all around you, supported by the mindless behaviour of all the other clones. And when I hear people talking about “thinking outside the box”, I know for a fact, that most of them never will.

Never mind “thinking outside the box” – what about living outside it?
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