Menlo Park's other wizard: IDEO General Manager Tom Kelley Menlo Park's other wizard: IDEO General Manager Tom Kelley (May 23, 2001)

By Jennifer Desai

Special to the Almanac

Tempting as it is to call Tom Kelley the next Wizard of Menlo Park in homage to the original - Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor who presided over that other Menlo Park, the one in New Jersey - there's something just not quite right about it.

For one thing, the geography's a problem. Though he lives in Menlo Park, as general manager of IDEO - a design firm that's developed products as familiar as the original Apple mouse and the first stand-up toothpaste tube - Mr. Kelley manages the business side of a wizardly crew that's based in Palo Alto. Strike one.

Strike two? That kind of pigeonhole is just too easy - facile, even - and IDEO hasn't gotten to the top of the innovation market by doing anything the easy way.

But still, you can see glimmers of Tom Edison in Tom Kelley. There's the glee Mr. Kelley finds in every gadget he sees, whether IDEO's had a hand in it or not. There's the scorn for conventional thinking, the kind of "start from the drawing board" attitude that had Ted Koppel marveling at IDEO's revolutionary five-day overhaul of the familiar grocery cart on a 1999 edition of "Nightline."

And there's the ghost of Thomas Edison in IDEO's teamwork style of inventing, a ghost that Mr. Kelley addresses directly in his new book, "The Art of Innovation." Dispelling the "lone genius" myth Edison's been saddled with, Mr. Kelley writes, "In six scant years Thomas Edison generated an astounding 400 patents, producing innovations in the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and lightbulb - with the help of a 14-man team. ... Even Michelangelo couldn't have painted the Sistine Chapel without the help of a gang of artisans."

For Mr. Kelley as for Thomas Edison, creativity isn't a one-man show; it's a team effort. And if Mr. Kelley's the managerial mind that helps keep IDEO's electricity bill paid, he's still not ashamed to pull out his Skilsaw and cut foam core alongside IDEO clients and designers as part of the firm's brainstorming and prototyping efforts. In fact, he delights in it.

Mr. Kelley's firm, IDEO, was founded in 1978 as David Kelley Design. That's right, David Kelley: David as in "Tom's brother." David as in "aversion to bureaucracy." David as in "tenured professor in Stanford University's Product Design Program."

In 1991, David Kelley Associates merged with Moggridge Associates and Matrix Product Design to form IDEO. "It's a prefix - as in ideology ," says Tom of the IDEO name, which was culled from the dictionary.

By 1991, David had established a reputation as a creative force to be reckoned with: It was he who had worked closely with Apple Computer from the beginning, and it was he who developed the "lavatory occupied" sign for the Boeing 747, a design for which the peanut-bladdered across the globe are still grateful.

Tom, who - unlike his brother, the engineer - had gotten a political science degree and been working as a management consultant for Towers Perrin, where he worked with companies like Singapore Airlines and General Electric, joined the firm as general manager in 1987 and helped the company grow from 20 designers to a staff of over 350.

"Like Walt and Roy Disney, David and Tom Kelley together make a complete protein," writes Cory Doctorow in Wired magazine. "David's the mad dreamer, Tom's the business dude with extensive Fortune 500 consulting experience."

Or is it that simple? "I don't know about being a complete protein," Tom demurs. "I do think we're a good team."

In his book, though, Tom admits to a certain difference in the brothers' instinctive approaches. "Growing up, I thought doing a perfect job in a coloring book meant placing one color within each space, being careful not to let it spill over a line. Meanwhile, my brother David splashed colors wherever he pleased, adding highlights and shading to create something that went way beyond a color-by-numbers approach. That's how rule-breaking starts."

You don't have to shed any tears for Tom the stuffed shirt, trapped in a madhouse of his brother's design, though; he's at least as likely to hop on a pogo stick as anyone else at the Palo Alto firm. And Tom's approach to institutional innovation - namely, inviting companies and clients into the IDEO offices to show them, firsthand, what innovation looks like - is probably as revolutionary as the physical products that IDEO engineers are developing. With $60 million in annual revenue and offices in far-flung international cities including Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Milan, IDEO's entering the 21st century as a design firm that also teaches the art of creativity - and Tom Kelley is owed a lot of the credit.

Check out the business section of any bookstore, and you're likely to see lots of new titles on innovation, creativity and management: Ideas that seemed mutually exclusive back in the bad old days of office hierarchies, gray-suited businessmen and Big Business are hot commodities now, when getting to market faster, sexier and splashier is increasingly important. Not surprisingly, the design firm that literally, for Procter & Gamble's Crest brand, turned the toothpaste tube on its head, is also at the head of the trend.

According to Upside magazine, in April of last year 25 percent of IDEO's revenues came from teaching other companies how to be innovative, and the remaining three-quarters of revenue came from producing products for clients, the "traditional" role for a design firm. But a company that won the famous Sand Hill Challenge in 1997 and 1998 by putting its own creativity to the test and building a better soapbox car doesn't do anything the "traditional" way.

To help their employees become more innovative, companies can work with IDEO in a number of ways, from having their employees spend a year with IDEO, to signing up for intensive weeks of long-range projects in brainstorming dubbed "IDEO University," to just about anything off the menu that companies - including Canon, McDonald's, NEC and Samsung - request.

And then, of course, there's Mr. Kelley's book, "The Art of Innovation," which Tom describes as an extension of IDEO's legacy and influence, as well as a how-to book for managers of small companies that are looking for a new way of thinking "outside the box."

"Tear up your Casual Friday policy and adopt an anything goes approach," he advises. "Let people use their own judgment."

The father of two young children, Mr. Kelley is a strong advocate for getting in touch with one's childlike side, as well. "There's a story Gordon MacKenzie tells about going to a grade school and telling the kids he's an artist. He goes to each grade in the school and asks, 'Anybody in here an artist?' In kindergarten, everyone raises their hands; by sixth grade, there are only two or three people, and they're looking uncomfortable. Something tells us as we grow that it's not OK to be an artist, to be creative, and sometimes to be creative you have to get past that voice, get back to the place where it's OK to try and fail," he says.

Not that creativity is all lighthearted; serious play is serious business, too - and sometimes, as Mr. Kelley points out, can lead to saving lives. Ask him what IDEO product he's proudest of and he won't say the original Apple mouse, the first laptop computer (for GriD Computer), 3Com's sleek Palm V or Handspring's Visor organizer. It's not the stand-up tube of toothpaste, either - though circumventing all those cap-on, cap-off, where-the-heck's-the-cap arguments has probably saved a few marriages.

The product Mr. Kelley's proudest of, he says, is the Heartstream Defibrillator, a simple little two-paddled device that can save the life of a person suffering from cardiac arrest.

"We made the interface as simple as it could possibly be, so that literally a child could operate it, if need be. We call it the 'Wet-Nap' interface, an interface that's so simple that the instructions say, 'Open and Use.' People's lives have been saved because of this device, and I think the simplicity of the design has had a hand in helping people use the defibrillator to save lives. I'm really proud of that," he says.

Of course, the book's a source of pride, too. "It just cracks me up when I walk to Kepler's and see my book up there, on the shelf," he says. "It's a little hard to believe it's real."

Which is ironic, seeing as how it's a Kelley trait, believing in things that haven't been conceived yet. Sometimes, as Mr. Kelley would agree, you have to learn to color outside the lines. Sometimes you have to ignore the lines completely. Showing others how to see between the lines and color where they please is Tom Kelley's passion, his forte.

There's another pizza lunch-cum-brainstorming session coming up this afternoon, and Mr. Kelley's looking forward to it. It's summertime at IDEO, and the living is easy, even if the answers aren't.