Applied Minds whiz Bran Ferren separates the can-dos from the wanna-dos by simply opening up his little yellow suitcase of contraptions and saying to a job applicant, “What do you suppose these are?”
So you want a job at Applied Minds. Who doesn’t? Every month about 20 of the nation’s most creative engineers and designers, including top graduates from Stanford University and MIT, apply for positions at this Glendale, California, design and invention firm. The client list ranges from trendy furniture-maker Herman Miller to General Motors, Northrop Grumman, and NASA. Story Musgrave, a six-shuttle-mission astronaut, works there. The cochairmen are Bran Ferren, former executive vice president for Walt Disney Imagineering, and Danny Hillis, whose insights underlie the operation of most supercomputers. The company vibe is geeky fun—there are cool robots, a secret doorway disguised as a phone booth, even free espresso.
But between you and the gig sits the box.
“I came up with the box because I found that there is almost no correlation between what people say in an interview and their ability to actually do stuff,” Ferren says. A résumé full of advanced degrees doesn’t help much, either. Ferren himself dropped out of MIT after one year to start a successful design and engineering firm, and he has found that many capable engineers are similarly unschooled. “The best folks are the ones who grow up with military surplus, who have been fiddling with things since they could walk.”
