Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [9]
The authority to help make those waterline decisions, however, does not come from organizational charts, as Lewis found out when he first returned to Gore—which has no org charts anyway. One of the ways that a leader at Gore acquires the authority to lead is by filling his credibility bucket. Lewis’s was empty upon his return, which explains why people wouldn’t listen to him.
One could imagine how the waterline, if interpreted broadly enough, could become a covert mechanism of control. But the waterline is not invoked very often in most associates’ daily lives. Individual initiative and risk taking have always been strongly encouraged at W. L. Gore & Associates. Bill Gore was known for asking associates on his daily plant tour: “Have you made any mistakes lately?” And if the answer was “No,” he would say: “You haven’t been taking enough risks.” Needless to say, if the risk is that you might fail to keep a commitment, you should warn others immediately. If you don’t, you’ll punch a hole in your credibility bucket.
For Gore’s associates, the result is a company where they feel uniquely free to pursue their own interests within the framework of a fulfilling job—or, rather, commitment. But for the company as a whole, the proof is in the results. And the company has been eating its freedom pudding for fifty years now. It still tastes as great as ever. In the early days, Bill Gore started out with an unloved little compound called PTFE and one product—coated wires and cables. Today, Gore takes in close to $2 billion in sales and is still growing by double-digit percentages every year, both in revenues and in the number of employees. It not only makes the most famous waterproof membrane in the world, but it continues to innovate in ways that no five-year plan could foresee.
ONE THOUSAND INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS
Take Gore’s foray into guitar strings, where it is, unbeknownst to most of the world, the market leader. The story of how it got there is surprisingly typical of the way that Gore has grown for decades, without planning. Elixir guitar strings are a premium product, selling for three times what ordinary strings can command in the market. But they came about, like Gore-Tex itself, through a happy accident of the sort that the company has stumbled into over and over. One of Gore’s associates in the medical devices division, Dave Myers, was a bicycling enthusiast who was unhappy with the performance of the cables used to shift gears on his bike.4 So in his spare time, he set about to see whether he could improve them by coating the metal cables with PTFE. It worked, but the product itself, Ride On bike cables, was something of a bust. In the meantime, however, Myers had moved on to another commitment—PTFE-coated wires for giant marionettes (don’t ask).
While working on the marionette wires, Myers hit upon the idea that would bring Gore into a whole new, and more profitable, line of business. Guitar strings age because they oxidize; dirt and grime from the players’ fingers accelerate the process. Coating them with PTFE might be just the ticket. Myers didn’t play guitar, so he tapped the experience of a colleague, Chuck Hebestreit, who did, and Elixir—a guitar string that sounds better and lasts up to three times longer than an ordinary string—was the result. Gore had no idea how to break into the market, and its initial—traditional—efforts flopped, so it resorted to a giveaway, including sets of strings free with the purchase of guitar magazines. The product took off; today Gore controls a third of the market.
As for Gore-Tex itself, it, too, was discovered by accident, by Bill’s son Bob. In 1969, Bob was trying to stretch PTFE into strands thin enough to be woven into a fabric. It wasn’t going well. In frustration, Bob took a piece of freshly extruded PTFE and yanked on it.