The Fabric of Creativity

Gore's first marketing coup came with Gore-Tex. For Gore, which in essence is a component manufacturer, the challenge was to find a way to outflank the middlemen and talk directly to potential consumers -- the people who buy clothing in retail stores. Gore simply sold the laminated fabrics to apparel manufacturers, which in turn relied on retailers. The solution: Gore created tags for the final garments that said "Gore-Tex: Guaranteed to Keep You Dry." This pathbreaking idea was later copied in the 1990s by Intel, with its "Intel Inside" ad campaign and its conspicuous stickers on personal computers.

Since then, Gore has repeatedly broken through resistance from hidebound industries. For 20 years, it kept trying to interest consumer-products manufacturers in its technology for creating a better dental floss, but the industry resisted. In the early 1990s, Gore took Glide to market itself and built a following by giving out free samples to dentists and hygienists, who spread their enthusiasm to their patients. It was an early example of viral marketing -- Gore's decision to give away lots of Glide floss predates Netscape's move to give away its browser. Gore followed the same tactic with Elixir guitar strings, which retailed for $15 apiece, three to five times as much as other strings. The product was so expensive that merchants refused to carry it. But the Gore people figured that consumers would demand it when they realized how much better it sounded. They gave away 20,000 samples in the first year, sending the product to the subscriber lists of guitar magazines. The strategy worked brilliantly -- with a 35% share, Elixir now leads the market for acoustic guitar strings.

Innovation for the Long Run

Gore's humanistic culture is the legacy of Bill Gore, who died in 1986. If you were asked to list the great visionaries of American business in the 20th century, other names would be more famous, but Wilbert L. Gore surely deserves to be on the roster. He's the closest thing to an East Coast version of David Packard and William Hewlett, both for his company's far-ranging engineering acumen and its reputation as an uncommonly benign place to work.

Colleagues describe Bill as quiet, humble, and completely approachable. His company has always been private, which helps to keep it out of the news. His wealth was considerable but inconspicuous. He never moved from the house where he started the company along with his wife, Genevieve, and their son, Bob, who at the time was a sophomore at the nearby University of Delaware. Even though Bill had been an engineer at DuPont, it was young Bob's experiments in the chemical lab that produced the startup's first product: a plastic coating for insulating electrical cables (foreshadowing Dave Myers's work decades later). Bill and "Vieve" raised seed capital from their bridge club. Their early employees slept in the basement and set up a production line in the backyard, often raiding Vieve's kitchen for cooking equipment they could adapt for manufacturing. They used an eggbeater to coil the cables. Early customers were surprised to find blades of grass mixed in with the cables they bought.

Forty-six years later, Vieve still lives in that same house, which is down a nature path from the office where the company moved in the 1960s and which is still used as its headquarters. When Bob took over as CEO in the 1980s, he still drove a 1955 station wagon. His associates say that they would be embarrassed to pull up to one of the company's parking lots in a fancier car. Joe Rowan, who works in medical products at Gore, says he once used frequent-flier miles to upgrade to business class on a flight, only to look back to the economy-class section and see Vieve Gore sitting there with a member of the company's board of directors. Colleagues say that success never went to the heads of any of the Gores, and the family's values are still strong in Bob's children, the third generation to work for the company.

The Gore organization isn't as fanatically flat as some idealized accounts have made it out to be. There is indeed a president and CEO, Chuck Carroll, a quiet man who succeeded Bob four years ago. And the company necessarily has some structure. The four divisions (fabrics, medical, industrial, and electronic products) each have a recognized "leader," as do certain companywide support functions (human resources, information technology) and specific businesses and cells. But there is no codified set of ranks and positions as there is in the typical corporation. As a Gore "associate," you're supposed to morph your role over time to match your skills. You're not expected to fit into some preconceived box or standardized organizational niche. Your compensation is tied to your "contribution" and decided by a committee, much the way it's done in law firms. The company looks at your past and present performance as well as your future prospects, which takes away the potential disincentive for investing time and effort in speculative projects. Gore encourages risk taking. When Gore people pull the plug on a failing initiative, they'll still have a "celebration" with beer or champagne, just as they would if it had been a success.