The 20% Doctrine: How Tinkering, Goofing Off, and Breaking the Rules at Work Drive Success in Business

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.

Drawing on case studies from Silicon Valley’s most successful companies, this essential guide for leaders reveals the core tenets of the 20 Percent Doctrine:

• Creative Freedom: Learn why empowering employees to pursue their own ideas—from Google’s famous “20% Time” to company-wide hackathons—is the single most effective driver of new products.
• Real-World Case Studies: Go inside the rooms where game-changing ideas at Google, Flickr, Yahoo!, and The Huffington Post were born, and discover the practical steps they took to protect and nurture them.
• Management Innovation: Move beyond traditional management dogma with a framework for fostering independent innovation and turning ad hoc experiments into profitable business lines.
• A New Corporate Culture: Discover how to short-circuit bureaucracy, build a culture that embraces tinkering and rule-breaking, and harness the passions your employees already have.

An inspiring exploration of how unorthodox business practices and the freedom to experiment can fuel innovation

We're at a crossroads. Many iconic American companies have been bailed out or gone bankrupt; others are struggling to survive as digitization and globalization remake their industries. At the same time, the tectonic forces disrupting U.S. corporations—ubiquitous bandwidth and computing power, cheap manufacturing and distribution—have enabled large organizations to foster new innovations and products through experiments that are at once more aggressive and less risky than they would have been twenty years ago. At companies such as Google, employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects they're personally interested in. Almost half of Google's new product launches have originated from this policy, including Gmail and AdSense. Now other companies have adopted the concept, providing them a path to innovation and profits at a time of peril and uncertainty and offering employees creative freedom when many are feeling restless.

The 20% Doctrine is about goofing off at work, and how that goofing off can drive innovation and profit. Here Ryan Tate examines the origins and implementation of 20% time at Google, then looks at how other organizations such as Flickr, the Huffington Post, and even a school in the Bronx have adapted or reinvented the same overall concept, intentionally and serendipitously. Along the way, he distills a series of common themes and lessons that can help workers initiate successful 20% style projects within their own organizations. Only through a new devotion to the unhinged and the ad hoc can American businesses resume a steady pace of development and profitability.

“In any organization a lot of the rank-and-file are ready to start efforts which will contribute to their community, maybe building the bottom line. They just need some time and real support from the people at the top. The 20 % Doctrineshows how organizations have made that work in real life, and how you might make that happen where you work.” - Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and Craigconnects

“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.” - Publishers Weekly

“Useful and inspiring advice for tinkerers.” - Kirkus Reviews

“In any organization a lot of the rank-and-file are ready to start efforts which will contribute to their community, maybe building the bottom line. The 20 % Doctrine shows how organizations have made that work in real life, and how you might make that happen where you work.” - Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and Craigconnects

“The most innovative companies in America are those that are willing to let employees explore their own pet projects on company time. The 20% Doctrine is a smart, well-written look at this new path to innovation, full of examples that are engaging, thought provoking, and intriguingly diverse.” - Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine

“The most innovative companies in America are those that are willing to experiment with strange new ideas, including the wild one of letting employees explore their own pet projects on company time. The 20% Doctrine is a smart, well-written look at this new path to innovation, full of examples that are engaging, thought provoking, and intriguingly diverse.” - Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine