The Fabric of Creativity

Leaders Are Talent Magnets

Gore's knack for innovation doesn't come from throwing money or bodies at a challenge, or from building a great ivory tower of an R&D lab. It springs from a culture where people feel free to pursue ideas on their own, communicate with one another, and collaborate out of self-motivation rather than a sense of duty. Gore enshrines the idea of "natural leadership." Leaders aren't designated from on high. People become leaders by actually leading, and if you want to be a leader there, you have to recruit followers. Since there's no chain of command, no one has to follow. In a sense, you become a talent magnet: You attract other talented people who want to work with you. You draw them with your passion for what you're working on and the credibility that you've built over time.

"Natural leadership" is how Gore, which had no experience whatsoever in the music business, wound up inventing Elixir, the top-selling acoustic guitar string and a big advance in a field that had gone three decades without a technological breakthrough. Elixir came out of an unlikely place: one of Gore's medical-product plants in Flagstaff, Arizona. Dave Myers was an engineer there who helped invent new kinds of plastic heart implants. Gore encourages its associates to spend some of their time -- typically around 10% -- on speculative new ideas. As a side project, Myers was working on his mountain bike, trying to make the gears shift more smoothly. He coated the gear cables with a thin layer of plastic, much like Gore-Tex. His tinkering resulted in Gore's Ride-On line of bike cables. That success inspired Myers to try to improve the cables used for controlling the movements of oversized animated puppets at places such as Disney World and Chuck E. Cheese's. He needed cables that had small diameters, so he tried taking guitar strings and coating them with a similar plastic. His eureka moment came in 1993, when he asked himself: "Gosh, would this make a good guitar string?" He had an instinct that the coating would make guitar strings feel less brittle.

Myers wasn't a guitarist himself, so he sought out help from a colleague who was: Chuck Hebestreit, an engineer who knew firsthand the frustrations that musicians had with the instrument. The natural oils on their fingers, which carry particles of dust and skin, contaminate the strings when they get into the minuscule nooks between the tightly wound wire coils. The accumulation of this tiny debris dampens the sound of the vibrating string and makes it maddeningly unpredictable. And metal corrodes over time, just from exposure to the air. So the strings had short, unpredictable lives.

The pair experimented for two years without success. Then another colleague at the Flagstaff plant, John Spencer, heard about their project. Spencer had recently finished working on Gore's launch of Glide, which two years ago racked up $45 million in sales. He sensed there was a chance to create as big an advance in guitar strings as they had made in dental floss. He joined the guitar effort, contributing in his spare time even as he worked on his main "commitment," which was more prosaic: to help develop an inventory-management system for doctors and hospitals.

Gore puts its R&D technologists and its salespeople in the same building as its production workers, so the entire team can work together and roles can blend. The trio in Flagstaff persuaded a half-dozen colleagues to help with improving the strings. They all did it in their spare time. Finally, after three years of working entirely out of their own motivation -- three years without asking for anyone's permission or being subjected to any kind of oversight -- the team sought out the official support of the larger company, which they needed to actually take the product to market.

Breakthrough Ideas Need Breakout Marketing

Beginning in 1958, Bill Gore tried to create the ideal environment for a guy like himself -- a geeky buttoned-down engineer. The place still seems like nerd heaven, and it's more than a little retro. After all, these are the wonks who took the advice that Dustin Hoffman's character rejected in The Graduate -- they got into plastics in a very big way. Longtime associates say Gore feels like a university as much as a corporation. And Gore's strategy still depends on its engineering prowess: The company insists that its new ideas have to be "unique and valuable" -- dramatic improvements, not me-too products. But since the 1980s, the company has learned that superior technology often isn't enough. You also need breakthrough marketing to push past entrenched but inferior market leaders.

The company insists that its new ideas have to be "unique and valuable" -- not me-too products.