6.
SHUN RULES

Many of the great advances in the sciences and the arts — indeed, in everything — happened because people broke the rules and conventions and established new ways of thinking and doing things. Van Gogh and Picasso, Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames, Frank Lloyd Wright and Antoni Gaudí, Beethoven and Stravinsky, Pasteur and Freud, Dick Fosbury and Pete Gogolak, Gerard Manley Hopkins and e. e. cummings, Kepler and Einstein — the list could make a book.

Creative people know this, know that one of the best ways to get ideas is by breaking the rules. That’s why they dislike rules and rail against them.

So make as few rules as possible.

Let them dress the way they want, and work the hours they want, and decorate their offices the way they want. If they want to work at the beach for a week, or play Frisbee in the parking lot in the afternoon, let them.

As long as what they do doesn’t hurt or inhibit or offend others, what’s the big deal?

Besides, who are you to impose rules on them?

It’s not your company alone. It’s yours and theirs. Together, you are the company.

So together you should make the rules, if any, that you need.

And — bank on it — you need fewer than you ever dreamed.