Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer Read Free Book Online

things. It doesn’t really matter what the thing is.” As a result, the company spends nearly 8 percent of its gross revenue on basic research, which makes it one of the biggest spenders in the Fortune 500. While most innovative companies are celebrated for a single innovation with a short lifespan — think of Netscape, AOL, or Atari — 3M has been inventing new products for more than seventy-five years. (The company was recently ranked the third most innovative company in the world, according to a survey of executives. It was beaten by Apple and Google.) Furthermore, 3M products that are less than five years old typically account for 30 percent of annual revenue, a fact that captures the constant churn of innovation at the company. “There’s an astonishing diversity of research going on here,” Wendling says. “I don’t think there’s another place that’s trying to invent the next sticky tape and the next energy-efficient television screen and the next generation of vaccines. We’re doing work in every scientific field.”
    This emphasis on innovation has been a defining feature of the company ever since Dick Drew invented masking tape. Although William McKnight, the CEO of the company at the time, initially disapproved of Drew’s quixotic pursuit, he quickly saw the potential of the new product line. (Adhesives, it turned out, were much more profitable than abrasives. As one 3Mer remarked to me, “Selling tape is a great business: you make it by the mile and sell it by the inch.”) And so McKnight dramatically reorganized the company, investing the tape windfall in a brand-new science lab. He hired dozens of researchers and gave them the freedom to pursue their own interests. That, after all, was the lesson of Dick Drew: even a salesman could invent an important new product.
    And that’s why I’ve come to the 3M labs in the dead of winter. I want to understand how this corporate history of innovation has informed its culture. Over the years, the company has learned a few essential tricks about creativity, and those tricks have been hard-wired into its research practices. “When you’ve been at this for as long as we have, you develop some important techniques for innovation,” Wendling says. “We might not be the sexiest company” — he points to a wall display filled with office-supply products — “but our approach is time-tested. We know what works.”
    Wendling then tells me about the first essential feature of 3M innovation, which is its flexible attention policy. Instead of insisting on constant concentration — requiring every employee to focus on his or her work for eight hours a day — 3M encourages people to make time for activities that at first glance might seem unproductive. Are you struggling with a difficult technical problem? Take a walk across campus. (When I visited 3M, in the late winter, the fields were full of grazing deer and employees stroll-ing in their puffy winter parkas.) Are you stuck on a challenge that seems impossible? Lie down on a couch by a sunny window. Daydream. Play a game of pinball. While 3M demands a high level of productivity — the parking lot was full of cars at 8:00 p.m. — it also encourages employees to take regular breaks.
    One important consequence of this approach was the invention of the 15 percent rule, a concept that allows every researcher to spend 15 percent of his or her workday pursuing speculative new ideas. (People at 3M refer to this time as the bootlegging hour.) The only requirement is that the researchers share their ideas with their colleagues. While bootlegging time has since been imitated at other innovative companies — Google, for instance, gives its software engineers the same freedom — the concept was first implemented at 3M. (The Google program is of fi cially known as Innovation Time Off. That program has led directly to the development of Gmail, Google’s successful e-mail program, and AdSense, a  fi