Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [4]
The visitor’s interlocutor was not simply an uncommonly polite machine operator in a brass foundry. He was the product of FAVI’s liberated culture. And what he called “good manners” were, in fact, the norms that serve in the place of top-down rules when a company is free. The visiting CEO might well have left thinking he couldn’t entrust his company to “good manners.” But then again, even the strictest rules are only as good as people’s willingness to follow them. The great intellectual error of bureaucrats everywhere is to assume that because something is called a rule, it’s preferable to a less formal arrangement. And yet most of those rules are not only great morale sappers, they’re preventing the vast majority of your employees from doing the right thing. The rules become so stifling that the only way for people to do a good job is to go around them—sometimes at great cost. At the same time, they are, as likely as not, failing to prevent the tiny minority of potential malefactors from doing your business harm. In these times, can you afford to continue stifling the vast majority of your people instead of giving them a chance to help your business?
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“HOW” COMPANIES AND
“WHY” COMPANIES
How Not to Run a Business
EVEN IF YOU don’t know what Gore-Tex is, you know what it does: It keeps you dry—guaranteed. As a brand, Gore-Tex has been so successful that it sometimes seems in danger of disappearing, of becoming a generic term like “Band-Aid.” Since it was invented in 1971, Gore-Tex has given rise to a number of competing products. Some of those boast properties said to be superior to the original. But if you walk into a store and want to know whether a ski jacket is waterproof, the question you’ll probably ask is “Is it Gore-Tex?”
It’s the kind of brand dominance—over both market share and “mind share”—that marketers dream of, or lose sleep over. The story of how it came to be, and came to symbolize an entire market category, is the story of two radical ideas.
Bill and Genevieve Gore’s first idea was that there were market opportunities for a chemical called polytetrafluorethylene—PTFE for short—that DuPont wasn’t pursuing.
Today, PTFE is best known as Teflon, that magical polymer that keeps our pans from sticking and our pipes from leaking, among a myriad of other far-flung uses. It is supposedly so slippery that it is the only known substance to which a gecko’s feet will not stick. But in 1938, it was an experiment gone wrong for Roy Plunkett, who worked at DuPont. Plunkett was trying to develop a refrigerant for car air conditioners when one of his canisters of gas seized up solid. He cut it open and found that the tetrafluorethylene inside had “polymerized”—that is, turned to a kind of plastic, white and slippery. Three years later, DuPont received a patent on the stuff, but then contented itself with selling it as a raw material to those who wanted to incorporate it into their products. It would be another thirteen years before a Frenchman, Marc Gregoire, stuck it to a pan so that nothing else would.
Bill Gore had other plans for PTFE. He thought it would make a great insulator for electrical cables. But DuPont was a chemical materials company, not an electrical products company, and wasn’t interested. So, at the age of forty-six, this father of four quit DuPont, licensed PTFE, and set up shop in his basement with seed money from friends in the Gores’ bridge club.1
As it turned out, Bill Gore was right about PTFE’s potential. But it was his and Vieve’s second idea that gave the world Gore-Tex, along with more than one thousand other innovative products, and made W. L. Gore & Associates into a multibillion-dollar leader in markets spanning from aerospace and electronics to energy and health care. Like PTFE, that second idea was borrowed, in a way, from DuPont. But like the remarkable polymer, Bill’s insight had to do with what the company he had worked at for years wasn’t doing.
Bill Gore believed