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

Description

Gawker tech-blogger and journalist Ryan Tate reveals how businesses can inspire greater creativity and productivity by allowing their employees to pursue their own passions at work. 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 all around the business world-from Yahoo! and Conde Nast to the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, National Public Radio, Flickr and the Huffington Post-to demonstrate how flexibility and experimentation can revolutionize any business model, including yours.

Ryan Tate is a business journalist and tech writer at Gawker Media. After growing up in Houston, Texas and San Diego, California, he moved to Berkeley 16 years ago for college. He still lives in Berkeley, but now with his wife Anne and several cats. When he's not swimming or wasting time on the computer, he likes to cook, and sometimes the cats even let him have seconds.

"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