Specialisterne turns autism into an advantage

Carmel Wroth | Jan/Feb 2010 issue

Danish entrepreneur Thorkil Sonne is driven by an unorthodox idea: what the world labels as disability can actually be an advantage. After many successful years as a technology executive in the telecom sector, his life was turned upside down in 1999 when his youngest son was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. He focused his considerable energy and ambition on helping his son, especially in thinking about his future. He read that few autistic people are able to hold down a job due to their difficulties with social skills and flexibility. In fact, according to one report, only 6 percent of those diagnosed with autism or Aspergers get jobs. “The literature is filled with description of what cannot be done,” he says. But he refused to accept this as his son’s future.

Instead he founded a company that would hire people like his son, pay them well, and turn a profit. “My ambition was to use the autism characteristics as a competitive advantage,” he says. His company, which he initially financed by remortgaing his house in 2004, is called Specialisterne, (“the Specialists” in Danish). It matches the unique skill sets of people with autism spectrum disorders—skills such as focus, high tolerance for repetitive tasks, and excellent memory—with a critical business need in the technology industry, software and game testing.

Sonne says his approach to Specialisterne came from observing his son, who, at age seven, had such unusual attention to detail that he could make an exact copy, from memory, of a complex diagram in an atlas. He realized that while most people find software testing tedious and often miss bugs, people like his son could be brilliant at it. The boy also had a passion for LEGO toys. Watching him, it occurred to Sonne that some of LEGO’s more technically complex toys could be used to assess and train potential employees with the same condition. He now employs almost 40 skilled consultants in Denmark who have some form of autism. All highly intelligent, none had been able to get a professional job before. Clients now include software and gaming companies such as CSC, Microsoft, Oracle and LEGO. Early in 2010, the company will open its second branch in Scotland.

The success is gratifying, but for Sonne it is only the beginning of what he hopes to accomplish. He wants to reach even beyond the 1 percent of the global population with autism spectrum disorder, to effect a wider pool of people with “invisible barriers that keep them from reaching their full potential” in the workplace, people with ADHD for instance. The Specialisterne consultants work with specially trained managers who have learned to create a structured environment in the workplace that allows them to be most productive. Sonne thinks this approach can serve as a model to “enable companies to hire people that do not fit in with the typical profile used by human resources.”

His company and vision has won widespread recognition as a groundbreaking social enterprise that leverages market forces to help a marginalized group. Robert Austin, a professor at the Harvard Business School uses the Specialisterne story as a case study in his classes. “This kind of company stretches traditional business thinking,” he says. He says it’s successful as a social business and also as an enlightened new management model. “You have to think about constructing the environment where your employees will be most productive and those environments are not going to be uniform,” he says. “The IT industry is full of people who are kind of different, and one of the challenges of being IT manager is getting the most out of people who need special treatment.”

Last year, Sonne established a non-profit foundation to spread his social business model for hiring challenged populations. His goal: assist one million “specialists,” his term for people with autism and other disorders or personality differences that make it hard to find their place in the modern workplace. This dream was inspired in part by the book, The Power of Unreasonable People by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan. “I identified myself as an unreasonable man who does not accept things as they are, but tries to change the world,” he says. “That gave me the courage to set high goals.”