I was working at the same job that I have in real life only I was designing outdoor gear instead of what I currently do there.  One of the unique things our company started doing was keeping track of what we did outside of work.  The adventures we went on and our leadership in the back country were factored into our performance reviews.  It wasn’t enough to simply design gear, we needed to live it.  I was excited that this change happened because there were a lot of old folks who were disengaged with actually using modern gear because they hadn’t been on  a trip or expedition in more than a decade (sounds a lot like my real life job only with technology). How can you be expected to innovate when you don’t eat, drink, sleep, breath, and live your job?  Actually, it wasn’t a job, it was a way of life and the more adventures I had outside of work the more I was rewarded at my job: rock climbing after work, hiking on the weekends, planning and leading trips to faraway destinations, all of these things went on my performance review and helped me to move up in the company beyond all the old folks who may have been good engineers/designers, I’ll give them that, but they aren’t out there on the front lines anymore so how could they possibly innovate if they’re not also the end-user of their product?