Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [10]
As impressive as Gore’s record is, there’s no denying that founder Bill Gore had certain advantages. He started the company and was able to shape it from its earliest moments. He could hire people with the attitudes and values that fit the culture he was building—although he occasionally had to deal with managers’ penchants for developing “formulas for failure.” He could let them find the roles where they were willing to contribute most. He could impose a principle that no facility could exceed 150 associates, in order to keep communication fluid. More generally, he could use his privileged position as founder and CEO to prevent even one drop of command-and-control culture from poisoning his corporate well—the uniquely free environment he was building in his company.
But what if you don’t have those advantages? Halfway across the world from Gore’s Delaware headquarters, Jean-François Zobrist faced exactly that problem when he took over a brass foundry called FAVI in April 1983.
THE CHAIN OF COMMAND
FAVI is as old-economy as they come, manufacturing brass plumbing fixtures and gear forks for cars. It was family owned, and Zobrist was parachuted in as CEO. Actually, he was helicoptered in. FAVI’s owner liked surprises. So after taking Zobrist on a one-hour helicopter flight to a destination unknown, the proprietor touched down at the plant and offered Zobrist the top job in a most unusual way. When they had landed, the owner gathered all the employees and informed them all—including Zobrist—that Zobrist was their new CEO. FAVI’s owner then left as suddenly as he had arrived. For three weeks Zobrist heard nothing further from him, until one day his phone rang. The owner asked Zobrist, “They haven’t wolfed you down, have they?”5
“No,” Zobrist replied.
“Well, then you can stay,” he said. After a short pause, he added: “Your charge: Make me money and don’t go to jail.”
Familiar with the owner’s penchant for extreme language, Zobrist translated this charge as “You have all the freedom of action you want, within the limits of law.” That suited Zobrist. But he soon realized that the rest of FAVI’s employees were not so free. Zobrist got an early taste of this one day while walking past the supply closet. There he saw an employee, Alfred, waiting in front of the closed window.
“What are you waiting for?” Zobrist asked.6
“I came to exchange my gloves,” Alfred replied. He hastened to add, “I have a slip from my boss and my old gloves.”
And so Zobrist learned the policy: When a worker wore out his gloves, he would show them to the head of the workshop, who would give him a slip for exchange. He would then cross the workshop floor—chatting with others and perhaps visiting the bathroom, before ringing the supply closet’s bell, waiting for the keeper, and giving him the slip and the old gloves. At that point, he could get his new gloves and go back to work. The process could easily take a good ten minutes—assuming the closet keeper was present and answered the bell promptly.
So Zobrist posed a question to the accounting department, which informed him that it cost FAVI the equivalent of one hundred dollars an hour to run the equipment on which Alfred worked. That worked out to more than fifteen dollars lost every time a pair of gloves needed to be exchanged—nearly twice what the gloves themselves cost. The real cost of the gloves to FAVI was so high that if they were freely distributed, the company would actually save money, even if some workers took home an extra pair for their gardening every now and then.
Of course, as in most companies, accounting had a line item for glove purchases but kept no track of the productivity lost to glove policing. In reality, FAVI was losing thousands of dollars by keeping the gloves under lock and key, Zobrist discovered, but on the official ledger,