Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [121]
Everything else was a distraction.”
We had asked him, “How much time did you spend building the environment—the culture—as opposed to running the business?” And when we asked whether he held this view of his job from the very beginning, he replied, “Absolutely.”2
As an adult, Kelley built one of the most influential design firms in the world. As a young kid, he took his first full-sized bicycle, a bright-red Christmas present, and spent the day sanding the paint off so he could paint it green. Later he would build his own tandem bike by welding two bicycles together. He also made his own Halloween costumes, to rave reviews. As an engineering student at Carnegie Mellon University, and then again in Stanford’s product design program, David Kelley’s only passion in life was to design and build cool stuff. Today Kelley is a professor at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the “D school”), where he spends most of his “free” time. And yet, when asked, he insists that everything besides maintaining IDEO’s culture during his decades as a CEO was a distraction. Paradox again? Let’s see.
It all happened, apparently, without a plan. While a doctoral candidate at Stanford, David did a lot of “creative engineering,” working on projects spanning from medical equipment to a reading machine for the blind to computers.3 In the late 1970s, Silicon Valley emerged as the place to be for young computer companies with an urgent need to develop innovative products. Many of them turned to Stanford students for help. Kelley was one of them, but he gleaned in these stints more than a simple way to gain extra money and creative design experience: “I thought this would make a great business.” So, in 1978, together with a business partner, he started IDEO—then called Kelley Design—and soon had Steve Jobs knocking on the door to design an early Apple computer (and later Apple’s first mouse). The company’s reputation grew. In 1980, the partner—more interested in entrepreneurship, perhaps, than operations—decided to leave, and Kelley bought out his 50 percent interest. Kelley thus found himself not only without a partner, but more dramatically in his eyes, without a manager to run the business. Considering himself a creative engineer, his first thought was to hire somebody to run the place. But then the surprise came.
The company’s fifteen employees, informed by Kelley about his intention, objected. “You’re fantastic at taking care of us,” they told him. “We love working for you.” Kelley confessed that before that, he had never thought of himself as good at running the business and was surprised that his employees might see him as “good with people.” But, obviously, Kelley did something to warrant a unanimous recognition of his leadership skills. This “something” explains the paradox.
FROM CULTURE EXASPERATION TO
CULTURE DESIGN
Unlike Bill Gore and Bob Koski, David Kelley didn’t have a clear idea of the corporate environment he wanted to build. But, like Gordon Forward, Stan Richards, and Gore and Koski, he knew what he wanted to avoid at any cost: the exasperating environment he’d experienced at two big industrial corporations after graduating from Carnegie Mellon. At those firms, he says, “I felt like I was cattle, a sheep.” Kelley explained:
If you look at how these companies are set up, … you get hired, and [then] they say, “Here’s your desk, you work for [A], you work with [B].” You are in a box! Well, I didn’t get to choose them [A and B]. You wouldn’t do that normally. I want to choose my friends, right? If I’m going to spend eight hours a day, or fifteen hours a day, working at something, I should choose who that is, rather than the company choosing who that is.
This didn’t help Kelley formulate a vision for his new company, but it did allow him to make a statement that became legendary. When we visited IDEO, the company was preparing for its thirtieth anniversary, and Kelley’s statement was emblazoned on the posters announcing the celebration: “I know that I want to start a