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It’s a typical Saturday, and Tom Kelley is out
perusing the toy store aisles with his eight-year-old
son. Suddenly, his son points at an Estes MaxTrax rocket
with a unique altimeter nose cone and parachute that
has caught his eye. “Dad, did you have anything
to do with this?” the boy asks. “Well, yes,
as a matter of fact, I did,” says Kelley.
Such a scenario occurs regularly for the Kelley family,
whether they’re shopping for toys, computers,
household gadgets, or virtually anything else people
buy. That’s because Kelley is part of the creative
team that runs IDEO, one of the most innovative design
and development firms in the world. The founder and
present chairman of that company happens to be his brother,
David Kelley.
At IDEO, Kelley, now general manager, has helped the
company to grow its current 350 employees and 8 offices
worldwide. IDEO has guided the creation of products
and services that span the range from whimsical to sleek
to functional to life-preserving—including the
original Apple mouse, Oral-B’s soft-grip kids’
toothbrushes, and Kelley’s favorite, a portable
defibrillator. The latter, a piece of equipment that
allows a layperson to administer a heart-resuscitating
shock to victims of cardiac arrest, which is now kept
handy on all major airlines and other public places,
says Kelley, “has saved more than 100 lives.”
Tom Kelley joined the startup in 1987 when there was
only one office in Palo Alto and 23 employees hand-picked
by David as much for their ability to pull pranks as
for their design skills. “My job description was
not well defined, but we knew it had something to do
with business,” Kelley laughs, adding that his
office consisted of “the desk of whoever wasn’t
there on any given day.”
Kelley immediately settled into the role he knew best
from his training at Haas and his five-year stint as
a management consultant—marketing guru. “I
was basically the whole department for 10 years,”
he says. “I think I sat in on meetings with more
than 1,500 prospective clients.” When not in meetings,
Kelley was furiously penning proposals to clients detailing
how IDEO could create new products and services to help
them solve their business problems—and getting
more than half of them accepted.
After Nightline profiled IDEO in 1999, Kelley was given
the go-ahead by his brother to carve some time out of
his work schedule to write a book about the company.
The fruits of that labor, The Art of Innovation (Doubleday,
2001) has sold well and launched Kelley’s public
speaking career. “The book has completely changed
my life,” he says with amazement. “People
look at me differently now. Even my Japanese mother-in-law
was caught proudly telling a clerk in the store that
her ‘son’ wrote the book.”
—Marguerite Rigoglioso
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