Credit or Influence

An eternal question for bloggers and opiners:

The lessons to draw here depends on whether you want credit or influence. If you want credit as an innovator then you should actually be pretty conservative. Become prestigious in a conservative way, until late in your career. Reject non-standard views but not explicitly; just ignore them so your quotes won't bite you later. When the time is right, look around for ripe once-contrarian ideas and take one. Change the name and vary the methods and topics, grab the first few high profile resources, and trash the original contrarians as weirdos.

Or "excitable". Think Bruce Bartlett and Alan Greenspan.