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WINGING IT IN START-UP MODE

When my brother David launched his business in 1978, he treated it as a project, like the snow forts of our childhood or the thirty-foot jukeboxes he made in college. The truth is, he just winged it and had a lot of fun in the process.

After less-than-exciting engineering roles at Boeing and NCR, David found his spiritual home in the Product Design program at Stanford, where he earned his master’s degree in the late seventies. Reluctant to leave such a stimulating and nurturing environment, David thought he’d go for a doctoral program. But the Ph.D. involved heavy doses of reading and writing—not my restless brother’s favorite pastimes. When the Stanford Design Department kept getting inquiries from companies looking for someone to solve their tricky engineering and product design problems, David decided he could do it.

David recognized that he had to start his own business. He knew he couldn’t fit in a conventional workplace. He wasn’t linear. His forte wasn’t sitting down and working. Nor did David have the attention span to follow somebody else’s direction. If he wanted to have a chance at success, he’d have to lead.

David decided he needed a partner and asked his Stanford mentor, Professor Bob McKim, for the name of a top student in that year’s program. McKim suggested Dean Hovey, and after Dean agreed to partner with him, David promptly abandoned his plans for a Ph.D. The first four engineers they hired—Jim Yurchenco, Dennis Boyle, Rickson Sun, and Douglas Dayton—were all Stanford grads who were friends of David’s. David believed that if he hired people he liked and respected, everybody would have fun and get more work done.

The work was truly like child’s play—they made things up as they went along. They found a couple of rooms at a dilapidated Palo Alto office above a dress shop. They made most of their own furniture. They spray-painted used chairs bright green and laid discount doors from the local lumberyard over dented filing cabinets to make desks. To match the chairs, they bought some green, cheap indoor-outdoor carpet. Finally, they slapped some paint on the walls and nailed up some sheetrock dividers.

The room dividers were intended to give everyone some semblance of privacy. But Dennis Boyle promptly cut a circular hole in the wall between him and Douglas Dayton and popped in a ship’s porthole. Adversity brought them together. The musty offices were so thick with flies that Yurchenco and Dayton built a funnel out of foam core to suck up the insects with a vacuum. They called themselves the Fly Group. For kicks, they built a fly the size of a pig out of foam core, painted it red, and hung it from the ceiling. Pranks became second nature. When Hovey left for a week’s vacation, he returned to find a sheetrock wall where his door had been.

Windshield cement inspired many office pranks. You’d leave your desk only to return to find everything glued down: soda cans, papers, pens. David’s door was once glued shut when he was getting a pitch from a salesperson. Another office was webbed in by the sticky trails from a hot glue gun. There were rubber band wars and squirt gun skirmishes (similar to the pranks at Apple at the time), and plenty of water balloons dropped out the window. Someone even built a key-cap launcher with a bucket of keyboard keys left over from a job. IDEO was like hanging out with your friends on summer break.

Jim Yurchenco says the pranks and play served a purpose—gave him a sense that he had some control over his destiny, a feeling of belonging to something larger than himself. Something of a loner, he was anything but a typical hire. Yurchenco had never studied product design—or engineering, for that matter. He had earned a master’s in fine arts from Stanford and spent most of his time in the university’s design shop making arcane electromechanical sculptures. It sounds loony, hiring a sculptor for a product design firm, but David was no fool. Yurchenco had excelled in math and physics and, like David, had grown up building things. David knew that Yurchenco was wildly capable.

The company had no business plan. David hustled up jobs. One of the company’s neighbors in downtown Palo Alto, Jerry Mannock, was an industrial designer and fellow Stanford grad. David dropped by to tell him about the new firm. Mannock happened to be doing a lot of work for Apple at the time, and next thing you know, David was going down to meet Steve Jobs.

David didn’t have a lot of experience, but neither did anyone else, it seemed. Companies big and small in the Silicon Valley were turning to people like David as they struggled to solve novel engineering and design problems in computers and other high-tech devices. Jobs asked David and his newly-formed team to help create the Lisa computer— forerunner to the Mac—as well as the mouse that would control its innovative graphic interface.

Like the e-commerce revolution twenty years later, it was a time when being old and wise wasn’t much of an advantage. You had to track down sources that could help you, and be bold enough to make some educated guesses. As David says, "When you’re stuck with a tough decision or a problem you don’t understand, talk to all the smart people you know." It’s the networking approach to problem solving, a lesson he learned in the early years of the firm.

It didn’t hurt that David was hanging out with some groundbreaking companies. Apple’s confidence was infectious. David loved Apple’s hipness, the fact that you could wear jeans and pad about in your stocking feet. He left Apple meetings feeling jazzed by its culture of innovation, by the way Apple’s labs and offices intertwined. Workers of all ages and experience seemed to effortlessly cross-pollinate. A teenager might be working next to a veteran engineer from Hewlett-Packard. There was a swagger in the air, the sense that Apple could take on any challenge and succeed. David heard tales of Jobs giving a block of stock to a draftsman, taking everyone to Star Wars in the middle of the day, quitting early for a volleyball game. And yet, they got things done.

David didn’t exactly follow the rules himself. There wasn’t room for a machine shop, so he got some two-by-fours and lots of corrugated fiberglass and covered up a central atrium. The floor was the asphalt roof of the dress shop below, and there was no door. To get into the shop, you had to climb out a window, pulling a power cord with you for juice. This makeshift prototyping space probably violated a dozen building codes and two dozen fire codes. But it was a quick and dirty place to stick a couple of saws and a drill press and other tools.

The Apple mouse was a breakthrough innovation that became an enduring icon of the computer age.

The boyish pranks and wild play didn’t just pump up the team. They also created an atmosphere where you naturally took chances and solved problems. You could stumble, as long as you fell forward. The team chalked up its share of blunders: parts that didn’t fit together, computers that wouldn’t pass muster at the FCC, mirror-image part drawings. But the team picked itself up, absorbed the hard lessons, and went on.

David was amazed at the opportunities. He’d expected to be kept behind the scenes—engineers at places like Boeing and NCR were treated merely as cogs in the wheels of industry—but within a couple of years, David was working for major corporations and meeting with company presidents. In high tech the executives really cared about products and about innovation.

Slowly, David’s company emerged from its first big transition. David’s partner traded in his share of consultancy for the majority ownership of a spin-off manufacturing arm. But the workers opted to stick with David and what became David Kelley Design.

Ten years later, responding to client requests for "one-stop shopping," the company went through another major transition by combining forces with Moggridge Associates in London, ID Two in San Francisco, and Matrix in Palo Alto. In casting about for a name for the new company, Bill Moggridge picked the prefix ideo out of the dictionary (as in "ideology"), and IDEO Product Development was born in 1991. Since that time, the firm has steadily grown and diversified, without ever seeing an unprofitable quarter.

Along the way, we’ve played a role in many key developments, everything from mobile computing and Internet appliances to minimally invasive surgery and cardiovascular monitoring.

As we’ve built expertise and credibility in some areas, we continue to "wing it" with new experiments in alternative business models, international locations, and innovative service offerings. IDEO continues to be a work in progress.

We wouldn’t have it any other way. X9vf4Wlc9OLP6Clta80ysg95O4b9POnMa2xblwZRTH7DPmIa4U1TH1BPckzBvjOJ