Gangsters can teach you about running a business

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Kyra Maya Phillips recalls sitting in a room with an ex-convict who was fresh out of prison after 21 years.Suddenly he stood up and told her, “Look around this room — there are about 100 weapons in here. I could kick that sink in and I could make a razor out of the ceramic. I could melt the plastic on that chair and I could make a knife. The wiring in that speaker on the corner, I could make a weapon out of that.”Phillips was in the middle of interviewing the man for the book she co-authored with Alexa Clay, “The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity from Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters, and Other Informal Entrepreneurs,” which came out in June.The ex-con was not threatening her, but rather, demonstrating the type of creative thinking he had picked up in prison. Circumstances (i.e. imprisonment) forced him to think outside the box and look at the world from a different perspective than most.”In prison, you can’t ask yourself the question, ‘How should I do something?’ because you don’t have the tools to answer that question,” Phillips said. “But what you can ask yourself and what you become very good at asking yourself is, ‘How can I do this?'” Now the ex-con applies that same thinking to his entrepreneurial pursuits.And that’s really what the book is about.