Fred Gratzon doesn’t fit the mold of the typical innovator. You can—and maybe should—be lazy, too.

Fred Gratzon, once known as the laziest man in North America, has something to tell us about innovation. I interviewed him on a beautiful July day in his hometown of Fairfield, Iowa. I think we can all benefit from what he had to say.

Who are you, Fred Gratzon, and why should we be talking to you about innovation?

I am the most unemployable person on earth. I’ve never been able to hold a job more than two months: I had to innovate to survive. In 1979, I started The Great Midwestern Ice Cream Company. To make a long story short, five years later People magazine judged my ice cream to be the best in America.

The next time I decided to tap into my innovation was when I lost my job at the company I founded. Based on a salary I thought would never go away, I [had gotten] married, had a baby, bought a house—and then my salary disappeared. I knew it was time for innovation, and that the idea would come to me.

I heard about telecommunications reselling and thought, “Here’s an opportunity to find an easy way to do something that lots of people find complicated.” Starting in the spare bedroom of my home, sharing childcare with my wife every day, I set up a long-distance business, Telegroup. This company that started from those beginnings grew to [employ] 1,100 people, [have] a quarter million customers and [do] more than $300 million in annual sales. Both my companies made Inc. magazine’s [list of] fastest-growing companies in the U.S.

In 2002, I wrote a book called The Lazy Way to Success, which is now [available] in eight languages. And I’ve had fun and taken time to be lazy the whole way here.

How could you possibly be lazy? It sounds like you’ve been busy?

I define work as: If you’d rather be doing something else, then you’re working. If you’re doing what you love, then what happens is that you start to appreciate subtler values of that thing, or nature reveals subtler secrets to you. A baseball player doesn’t just use muscle—what gives a pitched ball power and effectiveness is the subtle movement of the fingers, the trajectory and perfect timing. For that to happen, you have to be in tune with nature. You can’t do that if you’re tired, burned out, exhausted. I take time every day to be lazy. If I don’t, I’m not at my best.

Why is working hard the wrong idea?

Think of David and Goliath. If David [were] going to fight Goliath hand to hand, he would have worked very hard, gotten tired, bloody, dirty, and dead. It would have been fatal. He avoided hard work completely. He worked on a more subtle level—a flick of the wrist, and he was able to defeat Goliath. The way of doing less was innovation! It was working on a more subtle level. He used more subtle laws of nature—centrifugal force.
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KARLIN SLOAN, M.A., is founder and president of Karlin Sloan & Co. (karlinsloan.com), based in New York City and Chicago, which provides executive coaching, team building and leadership development services. Email Karlin at editor@executivetravelmag.com.