Headline Oct 23, 2014/

''' THE GENIUS MISFITS '''

IN 1956, William Whyte argued in his bestseller,  ''The Organisation Man'', that companies were in love with-

''Well rounded''  executives that they fought a  ''fight against genius''.

Today many suffer from the opposite prejudice.

Software firms gobble up  anti-social geeks. Hedge funds hoover up equally oddball quants. Hollywood bends over backwards to accommodate the whims of creatives.

And policymakers look to the rule-breaking entrepreneurs to create jobs. Unlike the school playground, the marketplace is kind to misfits.

Recruiters have noticed that the mental qualities that make a good computer programmer resemble those that might get you diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome - an obsessive interest in narrow subjects-

A passion for numbers, patterns and machines; an addiction to repetitive tasks;and lack of social sensitivity to social cues.

Some joke that the Internet was invented by and for people who are   ''on the spectrum'' , as they put it in the Valley. Online you can communicate without the ordeal of meeting people.

Wired magazine once called it  ''the Geek Syndrome''. Speaking of Internet firms founded in the past decade,  Peter Thiel,  an early Facebook investor, told the New Yorker that:

''That people who run them are sort of autistic''. Yishan Wong, an ex=Facebooker, wrote that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, has a  ''touch of Asperger's'',  in that ''he does not provide much active feedback or confirmation that he is listening to you.''

Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, says he finds the symptoms of Asperger's   '' uncomfortable familiar '' when he hears them listed.

Similar traits are common in the upper reaches of finance. The quants have taken over from the  preppies.  

The hero of Michael Lewi's book  ''The Big Short'', Michael Burry, a hedge fund manager id a loner who wrote a  stockmarket blog as a hobby while he was studying to be a doctor.

He attracted so much attention from the money managers that he quit medicine to start his own hedge fund, Scion Capital. After noticing that there was something wrong with the mortgage market-

He made a killing betting that it would crash. '' The one guy that I could trust in the middle of this crisis,'' Mr Lewis told  National  Public Radio,  ''was this fellow with Asperger's and a glass eye.''

Entrepreneurs also display a striking numbers of mental oddities. Julie Login of Business School surveyed a group of entrepreneurs and found that 15% of them said that they suffered from dyslexia-

Compared with the  10%  of the population as a whole and 1% of the population as professional managers.

Prominent dyslexics include the founders of Ford, General Electric, IBM and IKEA, not to mention more recent successes such as Charles Schwab (the founder of a stockbroker).

Richard Branson   (the Virgin Group) ,  John Chambers  (CISCO)  and Steve Jobs (Apple).

There are many possible explanations for this.

Dyslexics learn how to delegate tasks early {getting other people to do their homework for example) .

They gravitate to activities that require few formal qualification and demand little reading  or  writing.

The Honour and Serving of the research continues. Thank you for reading and see ya all on the following one.

With respectful dedication to all the  ''Genius Misfits''  of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' All Kinds Of Everything  '''

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless