Achievements
Bill Gore is the founder of one of the most innovative companies in the world. Today W.L. Gore & Associates with about 2 bn in annual revenues and 7500 employees makes more than 1000 products: from filters for reducing air pollution to guitar strings. He was also the co-inventor of commonly known GoreTex – material that has become the basis for a number of new products including the durable outdoor fabric that is still W.L. Gore's bestseller. Bill Gore was a leader who created an organization under which other people's leadership blossomed, and in turn it achieved its mission ''to make money and have fun.''
Career Highlights
Wilbert L. ''Bill'' Gore was born in 1912. He founded his company in 1958 at the age of 45. Before that, Gore spent 17 years at DuPont, where his last assignment as an R&D chemist was to find new commercial uses for Teflon. One night in his own lab located in the basement of his house he discovered a method for making computer ribbon cable insulation, but failed to persuade the DuPont management to enter that business. Then he decided to create his own company - in the same basement.
Bill Gore had a number of funny ideas, not least of which was letting almost a dozen of his company's first employees live in his house in lieu of wages. These early employees slept in the basement and set up a production line in the backyard, often raiding Bill’s wife Genevieve kitchen for cooking equipment they could adapt for manufacturing. Early customers were surprised to find blades of grass mixed in with the cables they bought.
In 1971 Bill Gore and his son Robert created a very strong, microporous material, trademarked as GoreTex. The material became the basis for a great number of new product possibilities, including the durable outdoor fabric that was introduced in the 1970s and is still W.L. Gore's bestselling product line. For this invention, Robert Gore was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.
Bill Gore died of a heart attack in 1986.
Leadership Experience
Colleagues described Bill as quiet, humble and completely approachable. His wealth was considerable but inconspicuous. And in his own company he tried to create the ideal environment for a guy like himself - a somewhat crazy buttoned-down engineer. Like many executives of that time, Gore was interested in Douglas McGregor's classic management book, The Human Side of Enterprise, which expounded Theory Y, very similar to what we now call empowerment. So he founded his company on Theory Y, and it hasn't wavered since.
Privately held W.L. Gore & Associates is built on what is called un-management. During his DuPont career Bill Gore became a fierce enemy of hierarchical, sluggish corporations. He used to say that "communication really happens in the car pool", meaning that at a hierarchical company the car pool is the only place where people can talk freely. Thinking over this issue, Gore discovered that traditional pyramidal DuPont’s structure vanished only during crises. In those cases specially created working teams operated out of all corporate rules, took risks and very often succeeded.
So why, Bill wondered, should we have to wait for a crisis? And he broke all the rules, creating absolutely nonhierarchical organization without any ranks and titles. In W.L. Gore & Associates the word “boss” is tabooed. All the employees (from an ordinary salesman to the marketing department’s head) are called associates. Nobody gets hired until a company associate agrees to ''sponsor'' the person, which includes finding work for him or her.
Bill Gore was fond of one-on-one communication. Anyone in the company could speak to anyone else, so people can get to know what everyone is working on, and who has the skills and knowledge they might tap to get something accomplished whether it is creating an innovative product or handling the everyday challenges of running a business. According to one business legend often told at W.L. Gore & Associates, in 1965 Bill Gore was passing around a new plant and suddenly realized that he didn’t recognize every employee anymore. It strongly motivated him to bring in a principle of no more than 200 people working under one roof. So far Gore & Associates doesn’t have a magnificent headquarters, as traditional corporations usually do. Its low buildings looking like small farms are dispersed on the large area and are often totally autonomous.
Being possessed by the idea of "natural leadership", according to which people aren’t born as leaders, but become leaders by actually leading, Bill Gore believed that a real leader should be a kind of talent magnet: you attract other talented people who want to work just with you. You draw them with your passion for what you're working on and credibility that you've built over time. It reflects some of Bill's leadership homilies, such as ''Leadership is a verb, not a noun,'' or ''Leadership is defined by what you do, not who you are,'' or ''Leaders are those whom others follow.''
Background Links
The Fabric of Creativity, Fast Company
The New Post-Heroic Leadership, Fortune
Who's Afraid Of A New Product? Not W.L. Gore, Fortune
