Places
Augustine can trace to childhood his enthusiasm for building things -- in some cases over and over again. (The airway device that was supposed to go on the market in three months actually took four years to develop and passed through some 300 iterations in the process.) The son of missionaries, the CEO spent his youth in the Tanzanian bush, more than 200 miles from any city large enough to deserve the name. "If we needed a water heater, it was a barrel sitting outside over a wood fire with a pipe," recalls Augustine, who at 48 is tall and fit, with close-cropped gray hair. "For power we had a diesel engine hooked to a generator, and every year we had to tear it down and overhaul it. I made my own toys. Living that way, you get confident that you can build stuff. Trying something new isn't scary."
After a stint in the navy, Augustine -- armed with a medical degree -- settled in Kansas City, where he worked as an anesthesiologist. But he soon became frustrated with the shortcomings of the operating room. What bothered him most was the inability to control patients' temperatures during surgery. "I was wheeling them into the recovery room cold, and I said, 'Why?" he explains. Techniques such as warming either intravenous fluids or the air patients breathe worked poorly. Warming the room itself, the medical literature suggested, was the only effective remedy, but "the surgeons won't let you do that," says Augustine. "So I thought, 'What if we created a cocoon of moving warm air around the patient -- a kind of personal little room?" That cocoon took shape on Augustine's workbench as an inflatable blanket riddled with holes that allow warm air to pass across a patient's body. In 1987, with the help of his father, he launched Augustine Medical in his garage.
"The Garage Startup," reads a plaque outside Augustine's office, and the historic photos beneath it -- a younger, mustachioed Augustine grinning in front of the manufacturing machine he built from scratch, the entrepreneur and his father dragging the machine onto a trailer -- attest to his enduring fascination with the archetypal birthplace of American ingenuity. "I'm a huge believer in garages," says Augustine. And in some ways Augustine Medical, housed in a featureless industrial park outside of Minneapolis, resembles a mammoth garage business, where most of the machinery is designed and built in-house, and where an engineer might be working on a new kind of chemical warming pack with the help of muffin tins and a $20 coffee grinder. New-product teams, which Augustine likens to start-ups, are often sequestered in separate buildings, isolated from the company's daily affairs. "In a garage, it's two or three people working in a 30-by-30 room, and you don't send memos and you don't schedule meetings -- you just talk," says Augustine. "All the bullshit that exists when a company gets bigger doesn't exist. It's a very efficient way to start a business."
"If you can't tell me two or three things you've tried, that's a good way to get on my bad side."
--Scott Augustine
Even in the main offices, Augustine has achieved a garage-like effect by creating plenty of places for intellectual interaction. Augustine Medical has 15 conference rooms scattered about, each with several whiteboards, so that whenever a hallway conversation threatens to turn productive, it can instantly find a home. (The conference rooms are named after scientists and inventors such as Einstein, da Vinci, and Ford. There's even one called Naismith, after the father of basketball. "He's a very important person," explains Augustine.) "An idea will go up on a whiteboard, and you'll see a parade of people from every part of the company going into that conference room for half an hour each and giving Scott their perspective on it," says Rock. "It goes on all the time."
A separate space, unofficially dubbed the Creative Room, is meant to facilitate the sort of thinking that is generally characterized by its incompatibility with boxes. The room is painted purple and gold and has variable mood lighting; a garish rabbit lamp adorns one wall; toys such as Slinkys, modeling clay, building blocks, and gyroscopes lie in a jumble on the conference table. "The Creative Room is still a work in process," says director of marketing Teryl Woodwick Sides, whose idea it was. "Originally, we were going to give it an underwater theme, and then we thought about making it into a giant toy box -- silly things like that. It's taking what ad agencies do to stimulate creativity and bringing it to a small medical-device company."
Augustine calls the Creative Room "fun" and "comfortable" but is skeptical that it contributes much to innovation. "I think our best problem-solving happens when three or four smart people get together and bang away at it, and we make that as easy as possible," he says. Nor is he convinced that innovation naturally occurs in an office between the hours of 9 and 5. Rather, people innovate whenever and wherever they think best, parameters far too vague and various to be incorporated into even the most flexible office design. Consequently, Augustine allows employees -- with the exception of customer-service reps, production workers, and a few others -- to dictate their hours, assuming that while they are away from work, work won't be wholly away from them.
Augustine does his own best thinking on the running path. He "religiously carves out the first two hours of my day for thinking and problem solving," which he accomplishes at the same time he's getting his exercise. "I'm out there consciously trying to solve problems; I keep track of them in my head," he says. "If my mind starts to stray to something unrelated, I'll tell myself firmly, 'No, I'm here to work." Randy Arnold, by contrast, feels most creative standing in a stream in the open air. So he doesn't consider it time off when, during the summer, he devotes one day a week to fly-fishing. "This company gives you the freedom to go where you're most productive in your thinking," says Arnold. "When I'm fishing, I'm still thinking about my projects. I'm not leaving my work behind."
