A workplace like no other

(FSB Magazine) Indianapolis -- Many entrepreneurs describe their great ideas as a lightning bolt of inspiration, but to hear Jones tell it, he's prone to frequent thunderstorms. "All of a sudden I can't sleep, and I have all these ideas that are unrelated to each other," he describes. "I just spew them on the page, and it feels like I'm channeling from somewhere else."

Five to ten ideas typically come at once, and anything not immediately scrawled down is lost forever. The episodes don't happen more than once every couple of months, he says, and dry spells have lasted as long as a year and a half. For reasons he can't determine, creative moments often happen on airplanes. "A lot of the ideas in my file cabinet were written on the backs of barf bags," he says. His staff has also filed away restaurant napkins covered in ink. "If I have that feeling, I've got to pay attention to it," he says, "because I can't control when it happens."

Jones's stuff gives him ideas. Clockwise from top left: an acupuncture model, TV wiring, owl vomit, vacuum tubes, a solar system, and a microscope.

Jones likes to bike as he scans data from eight computer screens.

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On the third floor of his home, a thumbprint scanner unlocks the door to his inner sanctum. A spiral staircase leads to his attic office suite, where he typically works until two or three in the morning. In it, he has a room with whiteboards floor to ceiling - and even on the ceiling - where he works out the details of his brainstorms. The suite also includes a room piled high with such gear as a signal generator, an oscilloscope, and a solar oven. This room and its odd furnishings, he says, serve as a laboratory in which he can tinker with new inventions. "When RadioShack has a sale, I buy them out," he says, gesturing to six black bags of gear.

The filing cabinets in his office hold roughly 200 business ideas he has developed over the years, each in its own folder. SAJ-008, for example, is labeled "Life Recorder." Says Jones: "There's a guy who ended up doing this where he strapped a camera around his neck and is recording his life full-time. I thought of it 15 years ago." He closes each file after he discovers someone else has executed the idea. "Music-on-Demand SAJ-101" reads another folder. It's from 1989.

There's no desk in this office. Instead, Jones designed a recumbent bike that seats him in front of eight flat-panel monitors, all connected to a CPU. The bike allows him to exercise while he works and think more creatively by having many documents and websites visible simultaneously. Jones has been known to bike for three hours at a time, sweat streaming, while he works. "I've done board meetings there with a phone, and people wonder why I'm panting," he notes.

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Not all his idea generation is so mystical. Jones regularly holds "green light" brainstorming sessions with two to six members of his staff in the whiteboard room of his private office. The lone rule is that there can be no negative comments. Nothing can be shot down. To protect his ideas, Jones records the sessions, photographs all the whiteboards before erasing them, and often has a patent attorney standing by to write up the next good idea.

The more impossible something seems, the more Jones likes it. What if there were a portal into the brain that could allow someone to see your thoughts? What if airplane passengers were loaded into pods within the airport and those pods could then be put on a plane?

He loves to tackle new industries about which he knows little. When he tells doctors of his plan to sequence a human's DNA in 60 seconds (it now takes two months), they always think he's loony. "I think that's great," Jones says with emphasis. "I don't want to come at it the way they do. They're stuck. They're boxed in. I'm coming in from an orthogonal angle and asking, 'Why not do it this other way?'"

To get his creative juices flowing, Jones often engages in bizarre behavior: eating without utensils, watching TV a foot away from the screen. "Anything I normally do, I'll do it differently just to see what happens," he says. "One time I sat so close to a screen that I could see the different colors in each pixel. It caused me to think about how you would make a flat-panel display that's part of your cellphone." His chief of staff once caught him standing back from the dinner table and using a fork with a three-foot-long telescoping handle. "It was the strangest thing I've ever seen," she laughs.

Many of his ideas turn out to be duds. His kids enjoy teasing him about the charcoal-filtered underwear meant to mask unpleasant odors. Another reject was a pair of microturbines embedded in the soles of shoes, meant to propel a person forward. That idea fizzled after Jones saw the movie Jackass, in which a rocket attached to a roller skate flipped a guy upside down. "I thought that's probably what would happen with my turbine idea."