Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [1]
We can guarantee you that important opportunities—for the elimination of senseless waste that shows up nowhere on your profit-and-loss statements, for keeping customers, and for acquiring new accounts—lie just down the hall, in the minds of the people you already employ.
But wait—don’t walk down that hall and ask them how to save your business just yet. Sit back down and keep reading. If taking advantage of those opportunities were as simple as asking people to raise their hand and speak, you’d have done it already. People respond to the environment in which they find themselves. That’s what McKnight meant when he said that if you put up fences, you get sheep. The fences turn the people into sheep in subtle ways that they themselves might not even realize.
Now, Matsushita was being a bit unfair—the problems with “Taylorism,” with turning your employees into automatons, have been appreciated for a long time, as McKnight’s observation shows. At times, trying to address this lack of autonomy has almost become an obsession among management gurus. But for all the ink spilled and all the energy expended in the name of empowering employees, Dilbert’s comic-strip world remains depressingly familiar to people inside most companies.
You might conclude from this that bureaucracy, top-down control, and maybe just a touch of George Orwell is simply the cost of doing business in the modern world. We may not like it, but is it possible to live without it?
The liberated companies in this book don’t just say that it is—they prove it. In industries that range from high-tech to manufacturing, from services to finance and to heavy industry, these firms have done away with the whole gamut of mechanisms of control that characterize too many businesses—and they’ve thrived as a result.
Freedom, Inc. is the product of more than four years of research. As we studied these companies, we became convinced of two things: First, they all have things in common that tie their success together with their culture of freedom. And second, if truly liberated companies remain relatively rare even today, it is not because their lessons can’t be applied elsewhere. The problem with bureaucracy is, instead, a bit like obesity. It’s no mystery how to lose weight or avoid gaining it. Study after study has affirmed the basic truth that if you consume more calories than you burn, you’re going to pack on the pounds.
We all know this. The evidence is clear, and so, too, is the road to our ideal weight. But more and more people don’t travel that road (your authors not necessarily excluded) because it’s easier to fall back on habit, even when the habits are bad for you. You may admire the svelte figure of some athlete or model and resolve to look like them someday—and then go back to your desk and sneak another bite of that candy bar.
Well, it turns out that a number of the liberated companies in this book are a bit like that supermodel. Executives come from all over the world to see FAVI in northern France or Harley-Davidson in Milwaukee. Harvard Business School has used Sun Hydraulics in Sarasota, Florida, as its main case study on freedom in the workplace. But while other executives—and even competitors—admire these companies from afar, they don’t, or won’t, change their own ways. This is not to say, however, that they can’t. They can. The very diversity of the liberated companies we encountered and studied convinced us of that. If a brass foundry in France, an insurance company in Texas, and a software firm in Pennsylvania could all set their people free; if liberating leaders could change the culture inside companies with decades of dysfunction in their past or build a new Freedom, Inc. from scratch; then there were lessons here for any company to use to their advantage.
Those lessons are:
1. Stop telling and start listening. Then, remove all the symbols and