It was a wild time. We wore comfortable clothes, worked 16 to 20 hours a day and loved it. The company loved it, too.
“Doug brings an extraordinary degree of creativity, entrepreneurial instinct and energy to his work. He has brought eight product concepts from invention to shipping, all within the past year … with a ninth project soon to follow. This has to be something of a record.”
– From my final personnel review at P&G
The corporation acknowledged and respected my efforts. But for all that, it’s still a corporation. And as with all corporations, certain rules of protocol are to be followed. The review continued:
“Doug has just one key opportunity for improvement: he needs to treat the ‘system’ with more respect… . (He) takes almost malicious pleasure in ‘beating the system’ by developing new product concepts faster and cheaper than if work were done through traditional channels … It does not help to rub people’s noses in their inefficiencies, their cost of operation or their tortoise-like speed”
– More from my final personnel review at P&G
Guilty as charged.
One February morning, after about a decade at Procter, I awoke and realized it was time to get on with the next phase of my life’s journey. A lot of people wait until they’re 65 to retire from the corporation and start living the good life. I retired in my early 30s.
Thirty-something–Corporate Rebel For Hire
I borrowed Ben Franklin’s pen name for my new company—Franklin having published Poor Richard’s Almanac under the name, Richard Saunders. And that, in a nut, was the birth of Richard Saunders International.
Ben is my spiritual mentor. He’s the original American inventor, as well as the original American entrepreneur. We share the same birthday, January 17, a scant 253 years apart. We both have receding hairlines and irreverent senses of humor. We both have far-flung interests ranging from science to business to politics. Our profiles and physiques are strangely alike, although I think Franklin may have had one or two more chins. The Wall Street Journal noticed the similarities, too:
(Hall and Franklin) “sort of look alike, especially when the balding and bespectacled Mr. Hall wears colonial-style shirts with puffy sleeves.”
– The Wall Street Journal
The original vision was for Richard Saunders International to pursue a combination of corporate innovation consulting and independent inventing/licensing.
Inventing was fun and profitable; we sold or licensed a number of board games and consumer electronic products. However, the innovation consulting business quickly took off at a level I never would have expected, and thus the inventing business was put on hold.
Our work for Pepsi-Cola, the Eveready Battery Company, AT&T, and Walt Disney generated a big buzz in the media world. In quick succession, we made multiple national appearances on Dateline NBC and CNN and were featured in Inc. Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and others.
Lou Dobbs on CNN reported research that showed the average American home has, on average, 18 products that we’ve had a hand in jumpstarting. In some cases, it’s been the invention of a new product or service. In other cases, it’s been the invention or reinvention of a client’s marketing methods. The number is not nearly as impressive as it sounds–when you realize that we work for clients like Walt Disney, American Express, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Nike, Kraft, Frito-Lay, Pepsi-Cola, and hundreds of others of the bestselling brands in the world.
As our work generated publicity, the name of our invention service, Eureka!, took over, and the name Richard Saunders International was assigned to the corporate holding company. With the construction of a custom-built creativity center just outside of Cincinnati we officially became known as the Eureka! Ranch. Franklin’s spirit lives on in a display in the lobby and in the Eureka! Ranch logo, with its flying kite and rising sun
The official name is Eureka with an exclamation point. Eureka! recognizes that magical moment of creation, when the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you suddenly see with clarity the solution to a seemingly impossible challenge.
In the original Greek, “eureka” translates to “I have found it!” Legend has it that the Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes coined the term after being stimulated in a hot tub.
Settling in for a long soak one day around 250 BC, Archie was preoccupied with finding a way to determine the proportion of gold to ordinary metal in King Hieron’s crown. Evidently, the king suspected he had been shorted by his royal crown supplier and was interested in ascertaining whether the crown on his head was mostly, if not all, gold or some cheap imitation. At the time, the weight of gold per unit volume was well known. But given the intricate nature of the crown’s design, with all its curlicues and whatnot, it was impossible to measure its volume.
So as Archie lowered himself into the tub, he noticed his bath water rise. The lower he sank, the higher the water rose, until it overflowed. The stimulus of the overflowing hot tub gave Archie an epiphany. He suddenly realized he could measure the volume of the crown by simply dunking it in a tub filled to the brim, then measuring the water that overflowed.
Archie leaped from his tub and ran naked into the street hollering “eureka!” Thus, in the grip of inspiration, he also invented streaking. And it didn’t end there–the hot tub revelation led him to the discovery of the law of specific gravity and the general science of hydrostatics.
Forty-something—From Idea Guru to Idea Factory Engineer
Eureka! success was tremendous. We had an industry-leading 88 percent repeat rate from some of the world’s most demanding clients. However, much of our success came from my personal ability to think bold thoughts. Or as Inc. Magazine described it: “Most of the winning creative leaps, most of the marketplace-driven reshaping of raw ideas, took place in the caffeine-stoked furnace of Hall’s own uniquely nimble mind, often at 2 or 3 a.m. during 72-hour sessions with clients. That’s when the real rubber hit the road.”
In the same article, writer John Grossmann described Eureka! as a professional practice not a reproducible business. “At the end of the day, Hall was no different from a doctor with a stethoscope around his neck or a wrench-twisting plumber. It all flowed through him. It worked because I ran around like the guy spinning plates on The Ed Sullivan Show,” I told Grossmann.
Near this time, I traveled to the North Pole by dog sled. It was a brutal 200-mile trip at 40 below zero. During the trip I came to the realization that my “legacy” to date included the creation of new types of tortilla chips, candies, caskets, credit cards, and cars. And while it made me laugh—it was not exactly what I had dreamed my impact on the world would be.
On the way to 90 North a new vision was born: a dream to translate what I’d learned into a reliable and reproducible business; to make the creative impact I delivered to my small, select group of corporate clients available to the masses of Real World entrepreneurs and corporations around the world.
When I returned to the world of the warm, every Eureka! session became a laboratory experiment. I became fanatical about measurement. We measured client teams’ states of mind before we worked with them. We measured them during the process of creating. We measured the end quality of all final ideas and their eventual impact on the world. We then did correlation and regression analysis to help us understand how to modify our actions to maximize client success.
The Eureka!