How to find, keep, and nurture creative talent in your company

Executive overview

Most companies hire for credentials and manage through rules. Both kill creativity. Nolan Bushnell — founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese — built companies by seeking out passionate, unconventional people and giving them the freedom to operate.

The book distills his experience into "pongs": short pieces of advice that apply where helpful, not universally. The core argument: innovation doesn't come from the person at the top alone — you need a pipeline of creative people at every level.

Finding and protecting creative people is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

Hiring for creativity

• Passion and intensity beat credentials — Steve Jobs was hired because of his "one speed: full blast"
• Ask candidates what books they read; curious people read, apathetic people don't
• Look for serious hobbies — they signal the broad, driven curiosity that underlies innovation
• Hire the unconventional: eccentric dress, unusual backgrounds, and "obnoxious" confidence are often proxies for creative drive
• The arrogant push their ideas harder and longer — useful when the idea is good

Creating an environment where creativity thrives

• Replace strict rules with flexible guidelines ("pongs") — rules applied universally produce sterile, homogenous results
• Keep the org horizontal: good ideas come from janitors, assembly-line workers, and assistants, not just executives
• Neutralise naysayers — they gain power by saying no, which requires no mental effort; force them to suggest improvements instead
• Run a "bad ideas" exercise: rank ideas worst to best, then ask how the bottom six could be made to work — shifts critical instincts into creative ones
• Institute "directed anarchy": skunkworks teams given autonomy to work on advanced projects away from HQ pressures

Protecting creative output

• Businesses suffer from the "tyranny of now" — people treat short-term demands as more important than building the future
• Haphazard holidays (announced a few days in advance) restore perspective and judgment better than scheduled breaks
• Allow sleep when the body demands it — chronic deprivation produces the same cognitive impairment as intoxication
• Build in solitude: Steve Jobs kept an almost empty house deliberately; uncluttered environments produce uncluttered thinking

Expect criticism — and ignore it

• Atari was called nuts; Chuck E. Cheese was called harebrained
• Every major innovation faced confident expert dismissal: the phonograph (1878), heavier-than-air flight (1895), the automobile (1903), the home computer (1977)
• Humans are bad at prediction; stop predicting and start building

The most important pong: act

• Everyone has ideas in the shower; what matters is what you do after
• Steve Jobs's defining trait was that he never stopped acting — he pursued ideas relentlessly, including Pixar, after a years-long conversation with Bushnell about computer animation
• WD-40 is named for the 39 failed formulas that preceded it — failure is data, not a verdict