Strive to do Better Everyday Visionary companies don't just talk – they take concrete actions to implement their values. While many companies claim to adhere to idealistic values, encourage experimentation or embrace constant progress, very little is seen in practice. The visionary companies studied, on the other hand, managed to translate their values into reality by creating concrete mechanisms that affected the daily lives and decisions of employees. 3M did not merely say, “We want our employees to be more innovative.” Instead, it implemented several mechanisms to encourage this idea, one example was allowing employees to use 15 percent of their time on pet projects and dictating that 30 percent of each division's annual sales must come from products less than four years old. Likewise, visionary companies did not merely talk about constant improvement; rather, they created mechanisms to ensure it. Wal-Mart, for example, spurred constant growth with so-called “Beat Yesterday” ledgers, which were used to compare each day's sales to those of the year prior. Similarly, Hewlett-Packard instituted a grueling process of ranking its employees annually to stop those who gained a high status from just coasting. The visionary companies also took concrete actions in the long run. They invested far more than comparison companies in creating new technologies and business practices, training and developing their human capital, as well as in supporting research and development. For example, when Merck wanted to become a force in medical research, it deliberately modeled its labs on academic ones and allowed its researchers to publish their findings in academic journals – very unusual for private companies at the time. It also decided the product-development process should be driven by research rather than marketing as it was in many other companies. This attracted top scientists to Merck's labs.