The Fabric of Creativity

Epiphany in the Car Pool

What really distinguishes Gore is its culture, which goes back to 1958, when Wilbert ("Bill") L. Gore left DuPont, where he had worked as an engineer for 17 years, and launched his startup. Bill liked to say that "communication really happens in the car pool." At a hierarchical company, the car pool is the only place where people talk to one another freely without regard for the chain of command. He also observed that when there's a crisis, a company creates a task force and throws out the rules. That's when organizations take risks and make big breakthroughs. Why, he wondered, should you have to wait for a crisis?

So Bill Gore threw out the rules. He created a place with hardly any hierarchy and few ranks and titles. He insisted on direct, one-on-one communication; anyone in the company could speak to anyone else. In essence, he organized the company as though it were a bunch of small task forces. To promote this idea, he limited the size of teams -- keeping even the manufacturing facilities to 150 to 200 people at most. That's small enough so that people can get to know one another and what everyone is working on, and who has the skills and knowledge they might tap to get something accomplished -- whether it's creating an innovative product or handling the everyday challenges of running a business.

Gore doesn't have an impressive campus that proclaims the company's success. It consists of several dozen bland, low-rise buildings scattered near the Delaware-Maryland border. They're separated far enough from one another so that each can house a small, autonomous team. Often, the buildings are set back from country roads. You can drive by and think you're passing farmland rather than corporate sites.

What goes on inside those nondescript buildings is hard to understand unless you've actually worked there for at least a year or two. Consider the case of Diane Davidson, whom the company hired to work on Citywear, an effort that has persuaded designers such as Prada, Hugo Boss, and Polo to use Gore-Tex fabrics in clothing that people can wear to the office or out to a party. Nothing in Davidson's 15 years of experience as a sales executive in the apparel industry, including a stint at Bostonian, prepared her for life in a place where there are no bosses and no clear-cut roles.

"I came from a very traditional male-dominated business -- the men's shoe business," she recalls. "When I arrived at Gore, I didn't know who did what. I wondered how anything got done here. It was driving me crazy." Like all new hires, Davidson was given a "starting sponsor" at Gore -- a mentor, not a boss. But she didn't know how to work without someone telling her what to do.

"Who's my boss?" she kept asking.

"Stop using the B-word," her sponsor replied.

As an experienced executive, Davidson assumed that Gore's talk was typical corporate euphemism rather than real practice.

"Secretly, there are bosses, right?" she asked.

There weren't. She eventually figured out that "your team is your boss, because you don't want to let them down. Everyone's your boss, and no one's your boss."

What's more, Davidson saw that people didn't fit into standard job descriptions. They had all made different sets of "commitments" to their team, often combining roles that remained segregated in different fiefdoms at conventional companies, such as sales, marketing, and product design. It took a long time to get to know people and what they did -- and for them to get to know her and trust her with responsibilities. Eventually, Davidson went on to oversee the sales force and product development for Citywear. She describes herself as a "category champion." She's involved in marketing, sales, and sponsorship -- a good example of how Gore's associates create roles that aren't easily defined by traditional corporate departments.

Her experience is commonplace. "You join a team and you're an idiot," says John Mongan, who has switched into new teams five times over a 20-year tenure. "It takes 18 months to build credibility. Early on, it's really frustrating. In hindsight, it makes sense. As a sponsor, I tell new hires, 'Your job for the first six months is to get to know the team,' but they have trouble believing it -- and not contributing when other people are."