Decades of innovation are hardly an accident for Gore, which was founded by its namesake, W. L. (Bill) Gore, and his wife Vieve in 1958. The company's highly unusual "lattice" organization operates without fixed hierarchies and is meant to harness the creativity of Gore's people, all of whom are called "associates." The system relies on careful screening of job applicants to make sure that they fit the Gore culture, and it keeps the focus at the team level, where associates are responsible to one another for the success of their projects. The system works: not only do Gore's people consistently drive innovation from the bottom up, reworking PTFE for bold new applications as a matter of course, but the company also benefits from extremely low turnover.

Associates, in turn, benefit from wide-open opportunities to build or join new self-directing teams and to help create new products. Rather than choosing project leaders on the basis of tenure or degrees earned, the company allows them to emerge project by project through the process of collaboration. A key Gore tenet is that a group works better when all of its members know one another, and that this familiarity is hard to maintain in groups numbering more than 200. So when a Gore team grows larger than that number, the company splits off some subset of the team into its own working space -- even if Gore has to build a new building expressly for that purpose. Considering the low turnover and the fact that workers own one-quarter of the company, associates seem to like the arrangement. (The Gore family owns the other 75% of the company.)

It's hard to argue with Gore's success with everything from GORE-TEX to Glide floss. Although the company is privately held and therefore does not publish detailed financial figures, according to its own reports it now employs about 8,000 associates and brings in annual revenue in the range of $2 billion. It runs manufacturing operations in China, Japan, Germany, the UK, and the US, and has sales and marketing outfits in about 25 countries worldwide. On top of that, it has won countless citations for excellence -- both in terms of its technological innovations, and as one of the world's greatest companies to work for. And although many companies stop short of copying Gore's radically egalitarian lattice organization, the company's methods have been the subject of many case studies by business analysts and researchers. Not bad for a little family-owned company that built its business on a single chemical fiber.

Comparable companies - known for product innovation and forward-thinking management = 3M, Procter & Gamble, Herman Miller