Other articles by Dale Dauten:

The Corporate Curmudgeon: 'Law of attraction' just a distractionThe Corporate Curmudgeon: Pressure plays a major role in leading people to greatnessThe Corporate Curmudgeon: Been there, done that won't cut itCorporate Curmudgeon: Bad times could offer best time to take chancesCorporate Curmudgeon: Excellent boss helps underling excel in job The Corporate Curmudgeon : For boomers, bromides may be best medicine Corporate Curmudgeon: Forgive the cliché, but 'Make yourself useful'Corporate Curmudgeon: Top leaders get creative at crunch timeThe Corporate Curmudgeon: Leadership can utilize recession as an assetThe Corporate Curmudgeon: Piglet's profundity: Forget about fright

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"Retro kitsch. Thoroughly sophomoric."

— From a book review in Entertainment Weekly

I don't know about you, but I haven't reached the junioric or senioric reading level required to subscribe to a publication like Entertainment Weekly, so I didn't read the above slam in the original. No, I read it on the back cover of the book it was bashing, "Cheese Monkeys," by Chip Kidd.

You can't judge a book by its cover, eh? When you see a cover that dares to make fun of book blurbs, like "Cheese Monkeys," you would be foolish not to make a smiling judgment about that book.

What got me thinking about the many delights of "Cheese Monkeys" was spending time with the author's new book, "Chip Kidd: Book One." The book is difficult to read; however, you just can't stop picking it up. Kidd has been designing book covers for Alfred Knopf for 20 years, and this is his retrospective.

I don't expect you to be agog at the topic of book jackets; no, I have something else in mind. How did a directionless boy who went to a state university become famous in a field without fame? And when I say famous, Kidd was in a "Jeopardy!" question in 2002 ("His work at Alfred A. Knopf made Chip Kidd a superstar at designing these."). He is the Elvis of his industry, achieved from the position of associate art director. That's "associate" art director. Yet ... the Elvis.

So I pulled my eyes away from the bizarre and/or beautiful book jackets in his book and actually read some of the biographical material. In an era where we rarely hear a rags-to-riches story — most of our cultural heroes started at the middle or higher — Kidd makes for a new sort of story, lost-to-found. He didn't have a dream — he had an aversion.

All you anxious parents worried about SAT scores, listen to Kidd: "Where I grew up, Penn State was the thirteenth grade. That isn't a knock, it's just a way of saying that if you knew you had to go to college and didn't want to deal with researching schools (me, in spades), good old State was it."

Then he described his choice of a major: "Early on my freshman advisor told me about a relatively obscure area of concentration within the (art) department called Graphic Design. How obscure? Well, they graduated 18 seniors a year. On a campus of 30,000-plus kids."

Without realizing it, Kidd had made his first decision toward being extraordinary, simply by rejecting the ordinary. And once in the program, he learned what he called his greatest lesson: "Any preconceived notion of an approach to take before you properly define the problem is folly."

The result? "I've been described as not having any recognizable style and that's one of the greatest compliments I could hope for. I want each book to have as much of its own individual personality as possible, based on what it is and what it's about."

Chip Kidd got where he is by accident, not design. He yearned to work in New York and was offered a freelance assignment doing a book jacket. The editors hated his sketches, but the art director passed them on to a friend at Knopf, a company Kidd had never heard of. We should stop here and recognize the management at Knopf for hiring someone without experience. And, not long after, hiring a new director who, like Kidd when he was hired, had never created a book jacket.

Kidd's hiring offers a lesson that would seem obvious, but it's a revelation to most businesspeople: If you want your result to be different, you have to hire different people. Moreover, you have to hire people who revel in the "different."

Most people in business don't aspire to a style, but a system. Every new problem is sorted into old solutions. ("What our new client wants sounds like the proposal we did for McDonald's. Just change the name, do a little tweaking and we're done.") It's systematic anti-creativity, efficient mediocrity. Most companies aspire to being different, but few understand that to get there they must embrace the unusual, whether it be a person or idea.

To return to Kidd's greatest lesson and sum it up in a single word, successful performers must be anti-preconceptionist. And I hope someday to see that word on "Jeopardy!," perhaps in response to "The secret of being a superstar is being one of these."