Eric Ryan focuses on building cultures that are both highly creative ("artists") and have strong operational rigor ("operators"). He believes operational excellence gives the company more time and resources for creativity, describing it as a right-brain, left-brain approach to organizational design.
Contrary to the celebratory image, selling a company can lead to a feeling of being "rudderless." For founder Eric Ryan, his identity was so tied to being "the Method man" that the sale triggered a period of unhappiness. He regained his purpose only after deciding to start his next venture.
Instead of asking for validation, which often elicits polite but useless feedback, Eric Ryan gave his business plan to 20 smart people and tasked them with finding reasons for failure. This empowered them to be critical, revealing true weaknesses and blind spots in his concept before he quit his job.
Eric Ryan physically manifests his company's core values in its office space. At design-centric Method, the entire office, including finance, looked like a design studio. At wellness-focused Ollie, the office was called "Camp Ollie" and located in a national park to promote a healthy lifestyle.
Ryan's innovation strategy involves "stealing" concepts from categories far removed from his own. For Method cleaning products, he applied personal care's focus on fragrance and design and housewares' aesthetics to create a product people wanted to display rather than hide.
Eric Ryan knew Method couldn't compete as just another cleaning brand against giants like P&G. Instead, he created the "premium home care" category, which blended design, sustainability, and fragrance. This prevented incumbents from simply extending their existing product lines to compete directly.
Ryan believes his most effective tactic for idea generation is exploring retail in a foreign market, preferably while jet-lagged. The unfamiliarity and language barriers force him to see products differently, relying on form and design, which sparks new insights that can't be found by scrolling Instagram.
After Target's buyer flatly rejected Method, founder Eric Ryan hired famed industrial designer Karim Rashid, whom he knew Target wanted to work with. He then used Rashid as leverage to secure a meeting with Target's marketing team, successfully bypassing the original naysayer to land the crucial deal.