The 20% Doctrine
How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive Success in Business
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Gawker tech-blogger and journalist Ryan Tate reveals how businesses can inspire greater creativity and productivity by giving employees the freedom to experiment and explore their passions.
We're at a crossroads. Many iconic American companies have been bailed out or gone bankrupt, while others are fighting to survive ever-increasing digitization and globalization.
In The 20% Doctrine, Tate examines how companies large and small can incubate valuable innovative advances by making small, specific changes to how work time is approached within their corporate cultures. The concept of “20% Time” originated at Google, but Tate takes examples from powerful businesses like Yahoo!, National Public Radio, Flickr, and the Huffington Post to demonstrate how flexibility and experimentation can revolutionize any business model.
By pursuing their passion projects, employees can fuel innovation and foster new ideas. Only through a new devotion to the unhinged and the ad hoc can American businesses resume a steady pace of development and profitability.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 20% doctrine, in which employees are given a fifth of their work time to focus on projects they're personally interested in, is hardly new 3M has been using a version of it for years but the concept took off as more companies took note of its potential. Gawker.com tech gossip blogger Tate shows how companies have employed the concept with varying degrees of success. When Google employees were given free reign, they came up with Gmail and AdSense (the pay-per-click advertising program that generates around $10 billion a year), as well as Google Reader, a high-profile failure-to-launch. Tate doesn't tout companies or executives. Rather, he champions the process, letting his case studies demonstrates how key tenets start looking for problems internally, move quickly, allow for subsequent iterations are just as important to success as the ideas themselves. He also shows how the concept can work externally, recounting how The Huffington Post took the notion and spun it on its head by asking readers to cover the 2008 election via its Off the Bus citizen journalism project. Tate's enthusiastic but objective study gathers momentum as the book progresses; each chapter builds on the previous one, and he's quick to point out the practicality of the process. Whether readers are in the corner office or the boiler room, they'll likely find Tate's opus to be inspiring and informative.
