Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [122]
He also instituted practices that would make sense among friends. One was Monday morning meetings. “Like the family sitting down at dinner on Sunday,” Kelley explained, “the whole company gets together on Monday morning and we just talk about what’s the most interesting thing that happened to [each one of us] last week.” Kelley also systematically refused to formulate any policies and would refuse if some employees proposed them. “They [would] always want it,” he said. “Well, I [would] answer them: ‘Do what you think is right. Don’t look in the book.’” At IDEO, leaders discuss decisions they are pondering with employees, giving them time to react. This included Kelley’s decision to hire a new manager to replace his partner, which employees reacted to in an eye-opening manner. Indeed, it was these and some other practices that his fellow employees—and friends—appreciated and pointed to when they asked Kelley to “officially” assume the role of running the business. This, Kelley commented, “gave me the confidence to build the culture.”
“Please meet my colleagues and, nevertheless, friends,” is an old joke in academia, referring to the sometimes tense relations among professors, or between professors and their academic superiors. Though universities should be a harbor of peace, they—like any bureaucratic organization—foster individualistic interests that often lead to conflict-ridden, rather than friendly, relations among colleagues. Kelley did not introduce the above practices all at once—not, he said, “because I was smart [but] because that’s the way I would want to be treated if I were them.” In the beginning, he was inspired by the practices of one large company well-known in the Valley for its enlightened treatment of employees: Hewlett-Packard.
Hewlett-Packard was started in 1938 by two entrepreneurs in a garage in Palo Alto. The garage is still there, and today it bears a plaque that reads “Birthplace of Silicon Valley.”4 Their radical culture, called “The HP Way,” was more renowned in the Valley than HP’s product innovations. It was egalitarian, decentralized, and sported as its first principle “We have trust and respect for individuals.” In a manner that would certainly please Zobrist, Hewlett once sawed a lock off a supply closet and left a note: “HP trusts its employees.”5 After that, no closet was ever left locked. At the time that Kelley was getting started, HP was still widely admired for its nontraditional culture. “I got the employee manual from Hewlett-Packard, tore the cover off it, and then I used it as my bible,” he explained. But because at IDEO he had not merely employees but friends, he would improve on HP, adding, for example, an extra holiday to the number HP had. That lasted for some time, but Kelley wanted something better. Then one day, he had a “Eureka!” moment: “Geez, this is a design problem. I can be the one who designs a culture.” At that moment, David Kelley transformed from a designer of cool products into a designer of cool culture and made that his “job.” Paradox resolved.
DESIGNING FOR FRIENDS
One problem that Kelley did not share with leaders such as Liisa Joronen was how the office looked. From the very beginning IDEO employees had freedom to design their own workplace. When we visited IDEO, we saw an old brown Volkswagen microbus in the middle of one open space. Coworkers had bought it on Craigslist as an elegant prank for their colleague and friend. They removed the engine and gas tank, built a desk inside the van, and wired everything to make it a perfect office. The colleague