What is so impressive about the story is that he didn't break the rules, he found a clever way to work within them. He was confronted with a brick wall most people would have seen as non-negotiable, and he found a way around it. This required subtlety and cleverness.<p>Outright breaking the rules is a shortcut that will often be morally wrong and will also carry practical ramifications that you probably don't want to deal with. I.e. you'll be a jerk and get nailed for it.<p>It takes nothing but shallow bravado and sociopathy to "break the rules." It takes a lot of smarts to work with / around them, and will work out a lot better for you.
This is nothing more than a bricks-and-mortar version of spam. Misleading subject? Check. Message scrambled so it can pass through the spam filter? Check. Exacerbating traffic congestion at pipe owner's expense? Check. Millions of people's time wasted? Check.<p>Ok, spam is not genocide, and ok, it moves product. But to make it into an inspiring Young-Entrepreneur-Breaking-The-Rules story? Give me a break.
Yeah, great for him. This law is in place prevent the tragedy of the commons from killing NYC traffic because "well, its ok for <i>ME</i> to block traffic selling my shit".
If he never closed shop he was selling over 11 pairs of shoes a minute for 2.5 days straight. I assume he was actually doing bulk sales to distributors.<p>The article doesn't make it clear. Was Market Week a retail event or a business to business event?
... and he embraces it. I learned this from one of his trucks (see <a href="http://i.imgur.com/UClZP.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/UClZP.jpg</a>) which told the story.
Millions of people work around stifling bureaucracies daily.<p>Anyone working for a large corporation probably has a dozen or more arrows in their quiver when it comes to working around stupid rules, inefficient procedures, or stupid/inefficient coworkers.
It's easy to break the rules if you just see them as rules, like kids do: they interpret rules literally.<p>If, instead, you have learned to see some sort of an authority or greater justification issued behind the rules, rules become bearly impossible to bend because you'd be not only mucking with the rules but challenging something much greater.<p>For an example, if you bump into a locked door of an abandoned old house, most people shy away because they <i>assume</i> the whole premises are off limits. While that is a safe assumption, a hacker mind would just consider the locked door as one particular blocked entry to the house and hop in through the basement window that was left slightly open. It might not be too relevant for him whether the premises themselves are, or are not, off limits: the hacker mind would realize that him looking around the house doesn't cause any tangential damage to anything, but at least he would satisfy his endless curiosity about what's inside.<p>Similarly this shoe guy realized it does no harm to anyone and nobody would actually care if he posed as a film crew even if they weren't filming anything. Well, it seems nobody did care!
He did break the rules, but these rules were irrational and he didn't hurt anyone in the process. Thats the ethical and moral dilemma that hustlers have to deal with every day.<p>This is an inspiring story, but when I hear about founders cheating, backstabbing and hurting others in the process, that is not inspiring... and there is a fine line between the two.
The lesson to be learned here is to make things happen - to find a way from A to B - to not take no for an answer.<p>It is not that breaking the rules is a good thing, only that sometimes it is acceptable.
Fun fact... Their legal name to date is still Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc. as a reminder to resourcefulness and innovative problem solving.<p>Source: <a href="http://www.kennethcole.com/content/index.jsp?page=our_story&h=1150&w=898" rel="nofollow">http://www.kennethcole.com/content/index.jsp?page=our_story&...</a>