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“Fustest with the Mostest” 215

der and needed more money to support his orchestra than the company
then provided through its meager dividends. To this day the company has
never been managed by chemists, but always by financial men who have
made their career in a major Swiss bank. Wilhelm von Humboldt himself
was a diplomat with no earlier ties to academia or experience in it. The
DuPont top management people were businessmen rather than chemists
and researchers. And while the Brothers Mayo were well-trained sur-
geons, they were totally outside the medical establishment of the time and
isolated from it.
Of course, there are also the true “insiders,” Dr. Wang or the people
at 3M or the young computer engineers who designed the Apple com-
puter. But when it comes to being “Fustest with the Mostest,” the out-
sider may have an advantage. He does not know what everybody with-
in the field knows, and therefore does not know what cannot be done.

II

The strategy of being “Fustest with the Mostest” has to hit right on
target or it misses altogether. Or, to vary the metaphor, being “Fustest
with the Mostest” is very much like a moon shot: a deviation of a
fraction of a minute of the arc and the missile disappears into outer
space. And once launched, the “Fustest with the Mostest” strategy is
difficult to adjust or to correct.
To use this strategy, in other words, requires thought and care-
ful analysis. The entrepreneur of so much of the popular literature
or of Hollywood movies, the person who suddenly has a “brilliant
idea” and rushes off to put it into effect, is not going to succeed
with it. In fact, for this strategy to succeed at all, the innovation
must be based on a careful and deliberate attempt to exploit one of
the major opportunities for innovation that were discussed in
Chapters 3 to 9.
There is, for instance, no better example of exploiting a change in
perception than Humboldt’s University of Berlin. The French
Revolution with its Terror, followed by Napoleon’s ruthless wars of
conquest, had left the educated bourgeoisie disillusioned with politics;
and yet they also quite clearly would have rejected any attempt to move
the clock back and return to the absolute monarchy of the eighteenth
century, let alone to feudalism. They needed a “liberal” but apolitical
sphere, coupled with an apolitical government based on the same prin-