It appears there may be as many as 12 steps in the process involved in solving problems or making critical decisions, whether in a business context or a broader social context. In most cases, many of these steps are side-stepped or short-circuited, often because the problem-solvers or decision-makers think they already have the information or perspective that doing them would provide. Perhaps this is why so many unimaginative solutions are developed and so many bad decisions are made?

The process of solving problems, when it’s undertaken thoroughly, can involve three different forms of interactivity (conversation, collaboration and canvassing), in engaging the energies of three different aggregations of people (individuals, teams, and ‘crowds’). The following table summarizes the 12 steps, and the interactivity, methods, deliverables and some facilitation tools for each:

Applying the process to a business problem:

Nash Instruments makes digital thermometers and other medical instruments for hospitals. They manufacture in Mississippi, taking advantage of low labour costs, but foreign competitors manufacturing in China have undercut them. The company is on the verge of bankruptcy, and 300 employees are depending on Nash’s ingenuity to reinvent their company to save their jobs.

So we start by teaching the core Solution Team of Nash the process, and creativity techniques so they can imagine a successful future for their company, not limited to incremental improvements. Then, with the Solution Team, we canvass customers and end-users of the company’s products and other similar instruments, and find out what untapped needs they have. We also study trends in the market, and scan across other industries, science, technologies, and nature, to surface new developments that might be adapted or applied to Nash’s products, processes, platforms, technologies, supply chain or distribution channels, core competencies, customer experience, brand, service or community wrap-arounds, or business model. Perhaps we discover that what customers are most unhappy with is the poor quality, ambiguity and reliability of these instruments — and that what customers want aren’t cheaper instruments, but simpler, more durable, more accurate ones. That they are buying the cheap ones made in China only because none of them differentiate themselves in other ways.

The third step is to analyze the root causes of the company’s current predicament. We know from the previous step that price really isn’t the differentiating factor that’s hurting the company’s sales, but why isn’t the company, with its skilled, domestic workforce, able to produce a better product? And are there other aspects to the undifferentiated ‘customer experience’, such as service quality? Or a distribution or marketing problem? Or lack of product diversity or innovation? Suppose we discover that the root problems are that the company has compromised on materials quality to try to reduce cost, that it’s slow to exploit new technologies, and that it has developed a reputation for unresponsive service. Once we know this, we refine the Solution Team, and develop the plan and timeline for solving the root problems.and meeting the untapped customer needs.

Then we conduct Thinking-the-Customer-Ahead sessions, using an iterative ‘what-if’ process to enable some of Nash’s most forward-thinking customers and potential customers to understand where their businesses, and instrumentation needs, are headed, which in turn allows Nash to craft a Future State Vision that satisfies those needs. Maybe we discover that the future of medical instrumentation is wireless, that displays are going to have to be flatter and sharper, that measurements in several medical technologies will need to be two orders of magnitude more precise, and that in some cases the tools will become so sophisticated that the instrument manufacturer will have to become part of the virtual medical team, on call 24/7 to assist in interpretation of the results.

And then we reach out to the larger constituency, all current and potential customers and end-users, articulating the promise that Nash could deliver and fomenting dissatisfaction with the status quo, creating a sense of urgency in the minds of customers and end-users, articulating the unmet need, and also creating that sense of urgency in Nash’s own people.

Next we do the creative work of inventing or reinventing products, processes, platforms, technologies, channels, brands, and even business models, and growing the core competencies needed to deliver on them. But we don’t put all our eggs in one basket: We develop a suite of alternative solutions. And then we use the Wisdom of Crowds process to present them to the ‘crowd’, as large a group of existing and potential customers and users and employees as possible, and use the crowd’s collective intelligence to help us select the best of these alternatives before taking them to market. Nash’s reputation is a problem — trying to go upscale with a new generation of sophisticated, precise instruments will be a marketing nightmare. maybe a whole new division with a new name is needed? And should the company try to overcome its employees’ near-total ignorance of how hospitals use its instruments, so they can offer virtual interpretation, or leave this niche to others? And should it overhaul its supply chain in favour of better-quality material suppliers, or even bring production of these materials in-house and cut out the middleman?

Now, with the confidence that we have the optimal solutions, we can design working prototypes of these solutions, and we can collaboratively run parallel experiments with different implementations of these solutions, failing fast and inexpensively to winnow out the implementations that don’t work in practice. How would wireless instruments avoid interference with, and from, other medical technologies in the operating room and on the patient’s night-table. What different techniques can be used to increase read-out precision without a commensurate increase in equipment cost? And when medical instruments need to be made in two ‘flavours’, one for sophisticated hospital use and the other for patients to self-diagnose and self-monitor, how do the price points differ and how should functionality and ease-of-use be traded off? Should Nash even be in both markets?

And then the implementations that succeed must pass the final hurdle, another collaborative process that encourages skeptical, critical thinking people in the organization to challenge whether this solution really is optimal, and unearth landmines and other problems the developers may not have thought about. Maybe the designers didn’t consider that baby-boomer patients’ eyes are weakening and the display in a new consumer product just isn’t large enough? Or that one of the new suppliers of a critical material is in financial difficulty?

Once the solutions have passed this final test, they’re ready for launch. The launch of dramatically new products, processes and technologies is a difficult process, and if not done properly and quickly can make an enormously promising innovation into a production or market failure. The launch needs careful project management, using a rigorous, tightly-controlled, one-step-at-a-time process.

It’s all common sense. The reason it is so rarely used is that few organizations have the competencies to do more than two or three of the 12 steps effectively. I’ve worked on all 12 steps at one point or another in my career, and they are not easy to master, but when they’re done well, they yield astonishing results. The answer, I think, isn’t just to bring in consultants to facilitate the process and then breeze out again. Advisers need to teach businesspeople how to do this for themselves, and then steward them through the process a couple of times to ensure they follow it properly. In a world where innovation will soon again be recognized as the only sustainable competitive business advantage, learning this process may the most important education for tomorrow’s business leaders.

And there’s no reason to believe this same process couldn’t be used to effectively address broader social, economic and environmental problems as well. I’ll explore that in a future article.

This ‘pull’ approach has two advantages over the ‘push’ approach: It encourages entrepreneurial and innovative companies to focus and collaborate to fast-track the solution to the problem (since if they don’t find the answer, they won’t get paid), and it costs the government or philanthropist nothing if a successful solution is not found (so the money can instead be spent elsewhere).

It has a host of disadvantages as well, most of which are due to the anti-innovative and anti-entrepreneurial nature of most large corporations and the politicians they own. Big corporations are risk averse, and would rather go for the next Viagra or other copycat drug that the rich and powerful will buy no matter what the price. And they don’t want to tell their shareholders that millions were spent on an unsuccessful research project, because investors are short-term focused and don’t appreciate that innovation and quantum-leap successes require risk and patience.

All the more reason why we as citizens should be pressing our politicians to switch most or all research funding of private enterprise to ‘pull’-approach funding. Just consider the $150 billion per year that North American and European governments each throw away in agricultural subsidies, or the even greater amounts that the US government is squandering on so-called ‘defense’ spending for foreign military adventures and absurd unworkable missile defense and Star Wars programs. If these billions were instead invested in ‘pull’-approach, successful-efforts research funding, imagine what could be accomplished!

This is how governments and foundations could encourage development of a true ‘market’ economy, instead of subsidizing the closed, innovation-averse global oligopolies that currently dominate our economy. Rather than being doled out as corporate welfare, with no performance requirement from corporate recipients, our tax money should go to guaranteeing prices and markets for products for which there is a pressing human need, on a successful efforts basis, and setting truly entrepreneurial, innovative and collaborative enterprises loose to chase after these rewards.

With governments in the back pockets of the oligopolies, we should not expect them to take any initiative to do this. But the UK government should be praised for this one brave example of ‘pull’-approach funding, and we as taxpayers and supporters of charities should be pressing our elected officials and the charitable and humanitarian institutions we support to follow this model more often.

The chart I’ve developed above shows how the process might work. Here’s an example of its application:

1. Suppose the problem is the need for a solar or wind-based technology that will electrolyze water to create the hydrogen needed to power home and automobile fuel cells, and a fuel-cell technology that will efficiently and economically store the energy until it is needed. First we’d set minimum specifications for technologies that will address these needs.
2. Based on forecast cost increases as we near the End of Oil, and the costs of remedying global warming and other problems hydrocarbon energy produces, compute a Real Value to humanity of a hydrogen-based solution.
3. Divide this Real Value by the Minimum Volume for the fuel cells and other components of the solution sufficient to meet humanity’s needs and to eliminate the need for non-renewable energy, to compute the Fair Price.
4. Have the UN, or some other international body, commit governments to guarantee the Fair Price and Minimum Volume to the first consortium of entrepreneurs that meets the minimum specifications.
5. Once the solution has been found, award the guarantees to the successful consortium. This will ensure they will be able to raise the necessary financing to produce the Minimum Volume of each solution component.
6. Determine an Affordable Price for each customer, ideally based on some percentage of the customer’s income and accumulated wealth. Distribute the solution to all customers, and use the federal taxation system or some other ability-to-pay mechanism to charge the Affordable Price to each customer.
7. The difference between the Minimum Price and the Affordable Price would be paid for from a Global Solutions Fund, which would be paid for by world governments apportioned on the basis of their ability to pay.

Yes, I know, it’s a dream, and probably a wildly idealistic one at that. The last two steps, as reasonable as they are in a mixed economy, fly in the face of a fundamental hard-line capitalist principle:  The rich get whatever they want, and the poor do without what they need.

But every new idea starts with a dream.

1. Moore’s Law yields to innovation: The long history of processor speed doubling every 18 months without changing price looks to be coming to an end, not because it can’t be sustained, but because other innovations, like dual cores, can accomplish the same ends without having to deal with the growing problem of overheating that fast processors must contend with.
2. VoIP makes distance irrelevant and increases the functionality of telephony: Although carrying sound over the Internet is most famous for killing phone companies that charge outrageous long-distance rates, and making all telephony flat-rate, it’s also increasing the traditional PBX phone system’s functionality, allowing people to dial others by clicking on their name instead of having to look up numbers, and providing ‘presence awareness’ (telling you before you ‘dial’ whether the person is available for your ‘call’).
3. Explosion of authentication and automatic identification systems: Increased need for security and the cost of maintaining password lists is driving this change, but authentication and identification systems, if they can walk the line between convenience and breech of privacy, could also simplify and streamline the process by which we get permissioned for almost everything, allowing us to access both physical and intellectual property without jumping through hoops.
4. Commercial gene therapy breakthroughs: RNA-interference therapies could soon be used to suppress messenger genes that cause diseases from AIDS to diabetes. But while the technical problems in making such therapies seem to be solved, the anti-innovation US patent laws remain a huge stumbling block, and patients may have to wait while greedy corporations sue each other to death or patent law reform enters the 21st century before the therapies can be brought to market.
5. Micro fuel cells’ last change to prove themselves real: Small fuel cells that recharge or even power small portable electronic devices off-the-grid have been promised for years, but technical and performance problems have delayed their coming to market. Next year may see the first few commercial releases, though they will be unfriendly to the environment (another ‘disposable’, and in need of constant refilling), and initially very expensive (as much as a dollar per hour’s worth of fuel).
6. Desktop search and desktop management heats up: Software vendors are finally realizing that the up-to-30% of people’s work-time spent ‘looking for information’ is often spent looking on users’ own hard drives, not on the Internet and Intranets. Google Desktop arrived with a splash this year, and many more desktop search tools are coming. But will vendors realize that search is just the tip of the Personal Content Management iceberg?
7. Medical equipment comes ‘of age’: Baby boomers are fueling the demand for new medical equipment that offers therapy for patients without the use of drugs (expensive, invasive, prone to side-effects, and slow-to-market) or hands-on treatment (even more expensive, and temporary). But while self-administered treatment is exploding, baby boomers are even more enthused with self-diagnosis, doing their own on-line research and using new diagnostic kits to avoid the doctor’s office entirely.
8. Web services allow small companies to grow up fast: New web service companies are providing, in small, affordable packages, the capabilities that big corporations developed in-house or bought from hugely expensive systems integrators and ERP vendors.
9. Asia and Europe extend their wireless lead over North America: Where 3G technologies dominate in Asian and European markets, North Americans still use their phones for voice calls and go online using cables or phone lines. Only 28% of Americans own laptops or cell phones with wireless data capability, and only a little over half of them have used that capability. The digital divide grows, on many fronts.
10. PC/TV convergence and the battle for the living-room: The much-ballyhooed convergence of the PC and the TV, and promised ubiquity of ’smart’ digital appliances everywhere hasn’t really happened. Why? Because for most of us, it doesn’t meet a need. Too many tech vendors are overly infatuated with their own technologies, and have no appreciation of the average consumer whose main consumer electronics purchases remain the traditional ‘dumb’ TV and telephone. ‘Smart’ devices will only succeed when the companies that make them smarten up and understand the mainstream customer and his/her needs and low tolerance for complexity.

I confess this list didn’t exactly blow me away with the ingenuity of technology. What’s missing from the list? I’m working on my own lists of Most Important Ideas of 2004 (in each of three areas: Blogs & Blogging, Business, and Politics & Economics), and I can use some help — this year hasn’t exactly been the promised banner year for innovation.

The innovation process at the top of this post is from Credit Suisse First Boston and is explained in more detail in my innovation paper.

• eliminating the project # and action # and just using the project and action names (although my eight Pet Projects still have numbers 01 through 08, in my priority order, so I can make sure they don’t fall too far down the list);
• combining the columns for Project Outcome/Name and Next Action Name, as reader Michael J. suggested; I put the next few Actions of each Project first, in date order one below the other in a single row of the table, followed by, at the end, in boldface, the Project name, with the estimated total time needed to complete the rest of the (as yet unlisted) actions;
• eliminating Allen’s separate Someday list, and opening a Project file for everything that was on that list.

So my GTD List, which now sits permanently on my computer ‘desktop’, looks like this:

Each evening I re-sort the table by column 3, so all the tasks that I’ve scheduled for the next day rise to the top of the table, with appointments scheduled for a specific time standing out in column 3. As additional ’stuff’ comes into various ‘inboxes’ during the day I use the GTD chart above to process it, dispensing immediately with the unactionable items (putting them in reference folders or tossing them as appropriate) and the items that can be done in 5 minutes or less (I use 5 minutes instead of 2 as the cutoff point for ‘Just Do It’ activities). The remaining items are identified as multi-step Projects  (P), ‘Waiting For’ items (W), Next Actions (N), or Appointments for the Calendar (A), and are added in at the bottom of the table, and scheduled and described as shown in the examples on the sample table above. I use the Context, Hours required, Energy required, and Priority to decide when to schedule each item, as Allen suggests.

I’m getting much better at budgeting time for each item, after initially under-budgeting by 30% and getting frustrated because I wasn’t getting through the tasks I’d set for the day. I still schedule 8 hours of work each day, and even with an extra 2-3 hours’ unscheduled work coming in each day I’m finding that I’m getting just about everything done on schedule.

I still keep my three paper lists (ideas to blog, books to buy, other shopping), which are updated daily, but otherwise I have no paper at all in my office except bills to pay and books to read. I appreciate that this is a rare luxury — most people have a lot more paper to handle, whether they like it or not.

In my case, considerable credit for the success of this process also goes to the ‘7 steps for handling anything effectively‘ that Cyndy and I co-developed: Sense, Self-control, Understand, Question, Imagine, Offer, Collaborate. I now use it as I begin each Action in the day’s schedule, and during the ‘What Is It’ assessment in the GTD process. Your frame of mind in approaching your work is every bit as important as the discipline of your workflow management process, in getting things done effectively as well as quickly.

The only obstacle I have encountered so far has been my tendency to procrastinate. Using GTD has made me so much more productive that I am sometimes tempted to reward myself by deferring tasks I really don’t want to do, or which are high-energy (intellectual concentration or creativity) tasks. This is a dangerous habit, since they tend to pile up and come back to haunt you. Instead, I’m learning to use some classical wisdom on how to deal with jobs you hate, or which make you tired just thinking about them: Break the job down into many sequential steps (Next Actions), each short and manageable in a sprint (in my case, an hour or less), and then pace yourself, doing just one or two of them a day, and rewarding yourself as each step is completed.

Example: One of the jobs I had scheduled for yesterday I had already put off three times. When I broke it down into steps, I realized that the cause of my reticence to tackle it was that it required me to write a  letter that would take considerable energy to compose, and would need to be customized to each of a dozen recipients, and that I would need to dig through my huge Address Book to find the appropriate recipients. My Address Book is a shambles. So I broke the project down as follows:

• yesterday’s task was drafting the letter, with several alternative paragraphs,
• today’s task was cleaning up my Address Book, identifying the recipients and their e-mail addresses in the process, and
• tomorrow’s task will be actually sending out the dozen e-mails.

So one job that, when looked at as a single task, appeared intellectually imposing, tedious and repetitious, became much easier to handle when it was broken into three tasks, with a break and reward after each.

So now my Address Book is all cleaned up, and I know exactly who my letters tomorrow will go to. I’m off to reward myself with some fresh-baked shortbread cookies.

A recent study indicated that the exploding European demand for organic products will only be sustained if the price premium relative to non-organic products is held to no more than 20-25%. My guess would be that North American consumers are much more price sensitive, and premiums will have to be reduced to no more than 10% to attain major market share.

Before botanic (meat-free, dairy-free, chemical-free) foods can start taking a big chunk out of the grocery market, and really start to have an impact on the quality of the food most people eat, on public health, on our beleaguered environment, and on the despicable practices and animal cruelty of factory farms, we need to solve these problems. That means we’re going to have to be willing to be innovative and open-minded about both the process and products, provided this doesn’t compromise the quality of these products or the nutritional, social and environmental objectives that are behind many people’s choice to adopt a botanic diet. Last June I proposed a 10-point plan to take botanic foods mainstream:

1. Rename vegan foods botanic foods, and vegans botanivores.
2. Remind people that grow-your-own botanic food is free.
3. Make botanic products available in bulk.
4. Educate people that botanic foods are easy and quick to prepare, and delicious.
5. Invent and celebrate botanic sauces.
6. Merge the best of international botanic cuisine.
7. Educate the public that botanic diets are healthy, and that many meats and other polluted foods are not.
8. Invent delicious botanic substitutes for dairy and meat products.
9. End agricultural subsidies.
10. Educate people that a botanic diet can help you lose weight.

Essentially, everything we eat consists of some combination of protein, fat, carbohydrates, water, natural micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, enzymes etc.), and often artificial ingredients (preservatives, colourizers, texturizers, flavourizers, and inadvertent chemicals and other pollutants picked up in the production process). Where do we draw the line on botanic foods? I think we want them to be chemical and pollutant-free, which means they need to be organically produced. We don’t want irradiated foods with their proven health hazards and nutritional damage. And we don’t want genetically manufactured foods, because they interfere with and potentially destroy ecosystems. But as long as all the ingredients are natural and unpolluted, and the product is healthy and delicious, I don’t think we should object to a little chemistry in the industrial kitchen. Hempburgers anyone? Since cellulose occurs naturally and makes an excellent fat substitute, can we find a way to use it as a food product without mixing it in a chemical soup as is done today? And instead of poisoning weeds and dousing crops with Frankenstein products like Round-Up, is there a way to make edible weeds a ‘growth’ industry?

Supposing you’re an aspiring entrepreneur and you want to help meet the need for inexpensive yet wholesome, widely-available botanic foods. Points 3, 5 and 8 of my 10-point plan above would be excellent starting points for a new enterprise. My articles on Natural Enterprise can help you through the process of building the business, and here’s a few additional thoughts specific to botanic food enterprises:

• Many Hollywood actors and other celebrities are vegetarians or vegans. Consider asking them to endorse or even lend their name to your new product. They might not even charge you for it, and give you a great marketplace boost.
• Other than price, the top criteria that most people use when deciding which foods to buy are convenience and flavour. Just like new products in any other industry, yours has to be better (more flavourful), cheaper, or faster (more convenient) than what’s out there now, if it’s going to succeed.
• Consider working with the Food Science departments of universities — lots of expertise at a modest cost.
• According to one recent study, the major deterrent to buying organic foods is perishability, as more shoppers are choosing to shop for food less often. Keep shelf-life in mind as you develop your new products.
• Several studies say ethnic foods are a fast-growing segment. There may be great opportunities for botanic ethnic products.
• If you’re going to get beyond the specialty stores and be mainstream, you’re probably going to need to partner with some company that already has a foothold in the big grocery chains. In doing so, try to find a partner that shares your company’s values.
• Another rule of new product introduction is to make it easy for customers to switch to your product from something they already like. Research existing meat and dairy substitutes, and market your new product as a healthy, inexpensive, guilt-free substitute for something that is already very popular.

Why don’t I start such an enterprise myself? I don’t know very much about the food industry. And my knowledge and skills in chemistry and biology are abysmal. If you ever saw me in the kitchen you’d understand! But I’d be pleased to provide assistance any way I can to those entrepreneurs who have the industry knowledge and skill to make a go of it.

If you’re not an aspiring entrepreneur, this is still an excellent time to Take the VegPledge, and learn more about the value of a botanic diet.

1. Delegate specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures, after they’ve expressed an interest or willingness to do it. Don’t just let people choose their own jobs.
2. Require all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to all those who selected them. The group retains the ultimate say over how the power is exercised.
3. Distribute authority among as many people as is reasonably possible, to prevent monopoly of power and encourage learning and consultation.
4. Rotate tasks among individuals often but not too often, so people learn many jobs adequately and to avoid turf wars.
5. Allocate tasks using objective criteria: competency, interest, responsibility, and opportunity to learn new things with appropriate mentoring.
6. Diffuse information to everyone in the organization as frequently as possible. The more one knows about how things work, the more politically effective one can be.
7. Provide equal access to resources (equipment, skills and information) needed by the group.

Freeman’s manifesto is dated, but these principles make sense when dealing with the proclivity (I think it’s learned, so I won’t say ‘natural tendency’) of people in groups to dominate, bully, gang up, hoard, compete, take perverse pleasure in others’ failure, and do things without adequate consultation.

My question is whether you can get people to follow these principles. If you have to impose them on the group, haven’t you already made the group less democratic by that imposition? And can you impose them on a group?

My (admittedly idealistic) proposal in Natural Enterprise is that self-selection of the group should prevent these problems from occurring in the first place. Those who are disinclined to work for someone who tends to want to dominate will select the dominant types out of the group. Those who want to be dominated, to be told what to do and how to do it, will self-select into groups that include that type of individual. Furthermore, in Natural Enterprise, the self-selecting group’s first task is to set out the mutually agreeable principles by which it will operate. Of course, this is a learning process, one that will be very new to most of us, so it should not be surprising that it takes some time for the self-selection process to work. In its early days, every Natural Enterprise will be expelling those who didn’t work out, allowing others who didn’t understand what they were getting into to select themselves out, and others to be invited or opt in in their place. Every system is messy when it first begins. And I have a great belief in instinct — it is rare when my first instinctive impression of a work colleague, positive or negative, has proven dead wrong. Nature has given us this marvelous gift of instinct to make the process of group self-selection easier and more reliable.

In the aforementioned article on collaboration I described a four-step program for True Collaboration: teaching it as a core skill, recognizing and rewarding its successes, self-assessing our competency at it, and practice, practice, practice. I have seen domineering people humbled by this process, but I have also seen egotistical, inflexible and unimaginative leaders completely ignore brilliant collaborative work-products. I’m the first to confess that collaboration is not currently something most of us do well, but I believe strongly that it works, makes us stronger and more resilient and adaptable as a species, and that for that reason the ability to do it well should be in our genes.

But I have also seen petty despots and cliques who have ruined the communities and organizations they preside over, even though some of them were elected by a majority and believe fervently that they’re acting in the majority’s interest, by minimizing their diversity (in every sense of the word) and essentially expelling anyone with different views. And I’ve seen dictators and cult leaders who rule with an iron fist, some of whom are extraordinarily popular, even revered, despite flagrantly violating these principles of democracy, egalitarianism and collaboration.

Are these behaviours — excessive dominance, bullying, ganging up, hoarding resources, competing instead of collaborating, and doing things without consulting others — unlearnable? And how about the behaviours that make these foolish behaviours possible — others’ submissiveness, cowardice, self-victimization, self-isolation, passivity, meekness, resignation — can they be unlearned too? Is it naive and unrealistic to think that we all have something valuable to contribute, we all instinctively seek and belong to communities, and, given a chance, we could and would all participate as equals in every community and organization to which we belong?

I appreciate that nature has endowed us with dominant and submissive genes, to establish a natural pecking order so that, even without language, we can maintain order in our groups. But in nature there is enormous collaboration and sharing of resources, infinitely more peace and equality and less suffering than we find in most human institutions. I’m not saying we need to learn to be exactly equal, just that by ‘ousting the egos and outing the wallflowers’, we need to learn to be more egalitarian.

I’d love to know more about how WL Gore really works, and how it doesn’t work (Derek suggests the power vacuum spawns horrendous political infighting and undemocratic decision-making). Anyone know people working at Gore, or other organizations with ‘no ranks, no titles, no bosses’, who could share their lessons learned?