I tend to agree that lateral thinking can be a real advantage, but the vagueness of both OP and this post sort of grind my gears.
Who won against unfavorable odds and how?
I don't know if this meets your criteria for winning against unfavorable odds or not, but it does seem like that team was punching far above their weight class.
If you were on that team I would be absolutely riveted to learn more.
Were you on that team?
Am I interpreting this correctly as sarcasm? If so, it seems to suggest that the product was overvalued, the acquisition a mistake, and the "success" more to do with luck or duplicity than "lateral thinking", "high performance individuals/teams", or similar ideas brought up by the OP.
Those folks were bright hackers to be sure, but these days the best marker of a bright hacker or someone who intends to be is that they hang out on here.
You can look up my join date if you want, it’s a long time ago, but when I joined up on here I was green as grass and in this field experience, practice and hard work are at least as important to outcomes as native talent.
If you ever want to bat an idea around: ben dot reesman at gmail.
You had me up to this point. Great satire!
Most breakthrough progress I observe come from doing things that are conventionally considered impossible, low impact or just bad decisions. But the person/team had an insight to make it possible and wildly profitable.
If you look around, it happens all the time. Google famously made search useful; TikTok found an edge in low quality short form videos, despite all existing major players concluding high quality long form videos is the way.
Keep in mind that the contrarian vision and initial implementation is just the start, they needed continued investment and innovation to stay ahead of competitions, or get copied and leapfrogged.
In my experience, high-perming teams are those which are built to allow creativity. High emotional safety to express ideas and concerns, evidence-driven reasoning, dedicated time for experimentation, open discussions on just about any topic, nobody pulling rank to get their will done, etc.
Good leadership, consequently, is nudging people toward being that sort of collaborator.
Critically, I believe all people are creative. Or rather, useful creativity is a serendipitous meeting between situation and person. Whenever I'm at a loss for how to solve a problem, asking more people has always been the right answer. There's always someone who can think of a high-value solution to a tricky problem, and it's almost never the person I'd expect to.
Of course, this requires that your goal is to solve problems effectively. For many people, the goal is playing politics and looking good. Then you want the opposite approach. Keep information to yourself and force others to go with your ideas.
When faced with difficult problems, there is a very large difference in effectiveness between engineers. And it's not a one-dimensional scale, a brilliant engineer in one area can be quite average when solving different types of problems due to lack of context/domain knowledge/experience.