How Will Your Company Adapt?

In 1969, Gore discovered a way to turn round, fat coaxial wires into flat ribbon cables using PTFE. IBM seized on the breakthrough to make its A360 mainframe computer smaller and faster, helping to turn the machine into a runaway hit. Gore followed with GoreTex, the monster brand extension that produces waterproof, breathable fabrics. Then Gore exploited PTFE's chemical inertness for medical grafts.

For pure adaptive radiation, however, nothing in the evolution of Gore and PTFE can top the day in 1971 when Bill Gore tied a strand of PTFE fiber to the hole in the handle of his toothbrush and started flossing his teeth with it. It sounds like the setup for a joke: How many engineers does it take to floss your teeth? But the punch line was for real. Gore eventually turned its nonshred dental floss, Glide Floss, into the best-selling floss in the United States -- a $31 million product. Gore's ongoing ability to practice adaptive radiation under the leadership of Bob Gore, Bill's son, who took over as president and CEO in 1976, is a textbook lesson in business biology.

Amplify Your Uniqueness

How has Gore managed to adapt its core product into so many different species? Part of the answer lies in a product-development process that values uniqueness. Part of it is the independence that the company gives its people. "Both of those things were necessary to draw floss out of Gore," says Burt Chase, one of the company's first salesmen and a senior executive. "Dental floss may seem like an unlikely product for Gore, but when you have the right conditions, you come up with unanticipated results. We have learned to capitalize on the unexpected."

Despite the company's adaptive culture, the idea for a better dental floss languished within the company for 20 years after Bill Gore first flossed his teeth with PTFE. The problem wasn't the idea -- it was the company's traditional business model. In some cases, Gore made money by selling PTFE fiber to other companies that then manufactured and sold new products, using PTFE as the raw material. Following that approach, Gore went to Johnson & Johnson and Colgate-Palmolive, two giants that dominated the market, offering a nonshred material for floss.

This time, Gore's model faltered. Five times over 20 years Gore looked into the idea of selling expanded PTFE fiber to floss makers -- and five times it found no takers. But Gore didn't abandon the idea. The company was convinced that it had the world's only nonshred floss. At Gore, that phrase -- "the only" -- has special power. "It's how we review product concepts," says Bob Henn, who oversees R&D at Gore. "We give you those two words -- 'the only' -- and then we say, 'Now, fill in the rest.' If you can fill in that blank and validate it without resorting to marketing gimmicks, then you're onto something."

Every Adaptation Needs a Carrier

John Spencer seems too quiet and self-contained to lead a struggle to transform a company's self-image. He's 46 years old, but it's not hard to imagine him 25 years ago, first as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, then as an engineer aboard a nuclear submarine. He still has the same neatly trimmed sandy hair, wire-rim glasses, and measured tones that he had back then.

In 1991, six months after joining the company and on his first week in a new division, Spencer heard about the stalled floss project. He quickly proposed a radical new plan: Stop chasing other producers and market the product directly to consumers. Spencer's proposal quickly aroused opposition from some of the company's most successful operations. The loudest objections came from Gore's medical-technology group, which had built up a profitable business manufacturing such sophisticated products as vascular grafts and artificial heart valves. "They voiced major concerns that putting the Gore name on a string for teeth would hurt the company's image as a medical-technology leader," Spencer says.

Spencer's response: Use a clinical trial to validate the product in a way that the medical-technology group would respect. It was a simple test, pitting Gore's PTFE floss against standard nylon floss and asking consumers which they preferred. Most picked Gore -- and those who didn't said that they doubted that the new floss worked, because it didn't hurt their gums.

The clinical trial was a breakthrough. The American Dental Association conferred its seal of approval on Gore's floss, which Spencer named Glide Floss. The loudest critics inside the company quieted down. And Spencer had his marketing hook: He would position Glide as the product for people who didn't like to floss -- in other words, almost everybody.