Robert Hernandez on how—and why—to go rogue, but respectfully

Interesting advice from web journalist Robert Hernandez, who teaches at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism: “Don’t wait. Go rogue. But go rogue respectfully.”

The “Don’t wait” part, Hernandez writes, comes from a commencement speech at UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism by Robert Krulwich of NPR’s Radiolab. He’s giving commencement-speech advice about launching careers in the exciting but “job-stricken” spring of 2011:

Some people when they look for a job in journalism ask themselves, What do I like to do and Who can take me there? Who can get me to a war zone? To a ballpark? To Wall Street? To politicians, to movie stars? Who’s got the vehicle? And you send them your resume and you say, “I want a seat in your car.” … And you wait.

But there are some people, who don’t wait.

I don’t know exactly what going on inside them; but they have this … hunger. It’s almost like an ache.

Something inside you says I can’t wait to be asked I just have to jump in and do it.

Hernandez extrapolates from that ethic to say it can be applied anywhere. Another way to put it is the old saw about not asking for permission, but just going ahead with what you want to do and ask for forgiveness later if necessary. That’s easy to say, but, as Hernandez writes, “It’s hard to do when you are working within a large system and you think the system has valid and established rules. Who are you to disrupt it?”

That’s why he advises going rogue the right way, which includes being respectful of the values of the system you’re working in, not disrupting just to create chaos; communicating with others, especially bosses, about what you’re doing; and making sure you take care of the regular old non-disrupting part of your job while you’re busy innovating.

Ideally, your efforts at disruption won’t lead to a need to ask for forgiveness. They’ll just lead to innovation.