Excerpts from "The Myths of Creativity" by David Burkus
W.L. Gore & Associates
At W. L. Gore & Associates, all employees start in the same position: associate.9 There is no clearly defined assignment and no ladder to climb if the assignment is completed well. Instead, new associates are paired with a “sponsor”—a longtime associate who helps translate the company jargon, introduces new hires to the larger organization, and guides them through the first few weeks of rotating around on different project teams. This is the life of new associates for several months, meeting people and learning about projects. It's an audition phase, designed to find the right fit between a new associate's skills and desires and the needs of a particular project team. And there are a lot of project teams.
Gore was founded in 1958 by Wilbert “Bill” L. Gore as an alternative to the large, bureaucratic organizations most people were used to. Bill Gore had just left a seventeen-year career at DuPont, where he believed the market potential of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, or Teflon) was being significantly underestimated. Gore had spent some time inside smaller, entrepreneurial-feeling R&D teams while at DuPont, and he hoped to find a way to ensure that his new company had a similar feel. He wanted all his employees to feel free to invest their time in projects they felt passionate about or to invent their own projects. To accomplish this, he created a structure at W. L. Gore & Associates that was drastically different from the large conglomerate bureaucracies common at the time.
In 2010, W. L. Gore and its more than eight thousand associates generated nearly $3 billion in revenue from a diverse set of products. Their most well-known product, Gore-Tex, is made from the very PTFE technology that Bill Gore left to experiment with. His son, Robert, discovered how to stretch the material into a threadlike polymer that was durable and porous, and that discovery became a platform for hundreds of products from boots and gloves to medical products to the space suits worn by NASA astronauts. Gore even used PTFE technology to create a stronger, less breakable dental floss. Gore sold the technology, now called Oral-B Glide, to Procter & Gamble in 2003, but continues to manufacture and develop the product.
Although W. L. Gore's products are certainly innovative, its unique structure is the company's true innovation. Gore has a formal CEO and is organized into four major divisions: fabrics, electronics, medical, and industrial. Beyond those elements, however, the entire organization looks quite flat. Instead of a hierarchy, Gore is structured as what it calls a lattice. This lattice is a horizontal structure in which everyone is connected to everyone else. The lines of communication are direct, and the responsibilities are lateral. There are no real organizational charts, no ladders to climb, and no departmental distinctions between creative and noncreative roles. Gore's core structural units are the self-managed teams of associates who band together around each project. These associates are responsible to each other. They rely on each other's creative contribution to a project's success, and they even determine each other's compensation.
Without a series of management tiers, there is no formalized system for green-lighting projects. So Gore relies on its lattice to develop new products. When someone has a new idea, he or she starts working to develop it and asks for help as needed. As people join the project, it gains momentum. If no one joins, the project suffocates. Although there are no formal titles at Gore—nothing distinguishes the PhD scientist from the marketing expert or the operations manager—there is one title that associates can have added to their business card: leader. A leader is someone who has started several projects or is asked to serve as a project leader often. Even their CEO (which their corporate charter requires) is selected via a collaborative process between the board of directors and a cross-section of Gore associates.
Before Dave Myers became a leader, Gore wasn't in the guitar string business. Myers, an engineer by training, was working on a cardiac implant project at a Gore plant in Flagstaff, Arizona, when he started experimenting with ways to improve his mountain bike cables by coating them with the same polymer used to make Gore-Tex fabric. After Myers made a successful prototype (and likely a great mountain bike ride), his mind wandered from his mountain bike to his guitar. Myers knew that guitar strings lose their tonal integrity as skin oils build up around and inside the steel coils. So he assembled a team of volunteer associates, and together they began to experiment with coating guitar strings with the Gore-Tex polymer. After three years of off-and-on experiments, the team created a guitar string that held its tone longer than any other string in the industry. It was an immediate hit in the market, and Elixir guitar strings still continue to outsell all other U.S. competitors.
Although W. L. Gore's four divisions do provide some degree of structure, it is common for people to work on projects across those four divisions. To facilitate collaboration, Gore intentionally keeps its plants small, usually fewer than two hundred people, and generally builds plants in clusters around each other. This allows everyone working in one plant to become familiar with one another, but also allows potential project leaders to move beyond their plant to others in the cluster when they need help—just as Myers did with his guitar string project. In this way, individuals from all backgrounds can join forces around a new creative project.
In a traditional organization, it's hard to imagine an engineer working on a medical device while simultaneously experimenting with mountain bike cables and guitar strings. But W. L. Gore is no traditional company. Its unique structure means that its employees don't spend time worrying about traditional labels or whether a project is in their department. There are no preconceptions about who is or isn't creative. Instead, if associates are interested and feel that they can contribute to a project, even one as new to the company as guitar strings, they make a commitment to the project and start contributing. Because there isn't a certain department for developing ideas or even a separation between product development ideas and marketing ideas, the entire Gore organization is a creative marketplace where people invest their time in the projects that appeal to them, and sometimes even compete for the ability to work on a new and promising project. This breeding ground for ideas is what allowed the company to grow to a portfolio of over one thousand different products, from the fabric in space suits to the strings on a guitar.
Gore is a unique organization with truly innovative products. In fact, its uniqueness makes it easy to dismiss as an outlier. The company was built from the start around the lattice idea and around the mission of developing new and innovative products. Perhaps Gore can avoid the traditional distinctions because it has been that way since its inception, but what about “normal” companies? Can such an idea be implemented in a traditional organization? It turns out that it already has.
Semco
In 1980, industrialist Antonio Curt Semler passed the ownership of his manufacturing company, Semco, to his son Ricardo.10 The company was founded three decades earlier, shortly after the senior Semler had immigrated from Vienna, Austria, to settle in São Paulo, Brazil. Over time, Antonio built Semco from a one-man operation in his small apartment to a company with $4 million in revenue and a hundred employees. He did it by following the traditional rules of industrial management. As he grew, he built a hierarchical structure in which management wrote policies and procedures, creating binders of specifications for every possible circumstance. Although this method worked at first to grow the company, that growth had slowed and eventually began to reverse by the time Ricardo took over.
The company Ricardo inherited was on the verge of bankruptcy. The traditional hierarchy wasn't performing well, and Ricardo needed a drastic shift. He needed innovation. He needed creativity, and he needed it from every level—from factory workers and from senior managers. The junior Semler decided to restructure the organization in hopes of allowing innovative ideas to develop at any level. Semler knew that not everyone would allow that to happen, so on his first day, he fired 60 percent of his top-level management team. At first, he attempted to restructure Semco as a matrixed organization, in which individuals were assigned to different projects, sometimes in different departments on an as-needed basis. When this failed to achieve the turnaround, Semler ditched the concept of assignments all together. He created a fluid organization in which teams formed and reformed around ideas and projects, and individuals self-selected in and out of those projects as desired. Although this might seem like a chaotic lack of structure, at Semco, individuals determine the structure by their actions. “That's not a lack of structure,” Semler argues, “that's just a lack of structure imposed from above.”11 Management doesn't make the distinction between creatives and suits; individuals decide for themselves what skills they have and where they can be useful.
Because Semler built an organization where individuals make the decisions about how to use their creativity, they use it more often. Eventually, Semler pulled back even further from making decisions, not just about people but about everything. In 2003, Semco threw a celebration to mark the tenth anniversary of the last decision the CEO made. The lack of top-down decision making and the democratization of innovation appear to be paying off. Also in 2003, Semco celebrated annual revenues of $212 million, a substantial turnaround for a company that was once nearly bankrupt.
W. L. Gore and Semco are illustrations of how continuous innovation can flourish in an organization that accepts the creative potential of all its members. The Breed Myth doesn't survive in places like Gore or Semco, where everyone can propose ideas and find himself or herself leading a team. Instead of imposing departmental separation between creative and noncreative types, Semco created an organizational structure in which the projects and products, not an assumed genetic distinction or a self-imposed differentiation, affect one's role. Instead of managers using the creatives-and-suits distinction to draw up a top-down hierarchy, Gore lets its people self-select into roles where they can use the creative insights they have, even in ways the U.S. Department of Labor might not classify as “creative.”
It's easy to trust the Breed Myth. It's easy to believe that some are born creative and others less so. Our current understanding of genetics leaves us eager to explain away creative ability as coded into someone's genes and thus downplay the creative potential of others. Even the bureaucratic rules surrounding labor and human resources rely on the Breed Myth, specifying a supposed distinction between positions that demonstrate creativity and those that do not. But the evidence supports a different conclusion. Creative ability isn't limited to a particular personality type, and it isn't controlled by our genetic code. When traditional organizations separate those they think are creative from those they think are not, they are severely limiting their own potential for success. Smart organizations, like W. L. Gore and Semco, have abandoned this false division altogether and have structured themselves so that creativity arises from across the entire firm. Every organization wanting to stay competitive in an innovation-driven economy needs creativity from every one of its people. We need innovative ideas too much to seek them out from only those of a certain, imaginary breed.
No comments:
Post a Comment