Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [103]
The financial controllers were not pleased. “They made a big fuss,” Raiman said. “The finance director said that I wanted to destroy the financial controls, that I didn’t like them [the controllers] anymore, and that I wanted to destroy the company.” Raiman assured him that he wasn’t out to fire the finance department, but that he did want them to play a different role. As for the director himself, Raiman left him in place but limited his duties. “I wasn’t sure I had convinced him,” Raiman remarked. “So he remained the head of accounting, and as a finance director dealt with relations with the banks, investors, et cetera.”
Once they decided to scrap this strict financial policing, they embarked on another series of meetings with executives to explain the new approach. “I remember one [meeting] in Paris,” Raiman recalled. “Together with [human resources director] Jean-François Cottin, we tried to explain to a dozen of our executives a [new] company model based on respect for people. We told them that this new system was realistic, while the old one wasn’t because all the [reported] numbers were false.”
This did not produce the result that Raiman had been aiming for, however. “They said that we needed more control,” Jacques noted with a rueful smile. “Then, others said, ‘[This new system] is fine for us; we must be respected and be autonomous. But you won’t do that for the data-entry shop floor, with the ignorant girls there, right? For them it’s a drubbing,’” not freedom, that is needed.
When we asked Raiman how he dealt with this resistance, he characteristically responded not with exasperation, but affection. “I’ll tell you: I liked them very much,”6 he said, suggesting that, even if some of them didn’t share his convictions about how to run the company, he had a strong personal bond with them. To this, Cottin, whom we interviewed together with Raiman, chimed in. Besides, he said, “The first rule is that when somebody does something stupid, the most important thing is that he admits it rather than be condemned.” Since they were, in effect, asking that this principle be applied to the financial reporting, they ought to try to apply it in their own dealings with the executive team.
“So, I asked myself: How can I convince them?” Raiman continued. He sent these executives to America for training and brought in outsiders to hold conferences in the company “to show how important it is to ask frontline people’s opinion, make them participate in the decisions.” Raiman described the process of pushing this new freedom-and respect-based culture down through the company as a series of incremental, nonthreatening steps, not some big bang. “We didn’t make any big speeches,” Cottin added. “We just acted, a lot of little acts, steps.” For a CEO who wants to change executives’ and managers’ practices, this nonthreatening, patient way is the only effective way to do it. One of their techniques was to show the difficulty, if not the futility, of effective controls in an atmosphere of distrust and disrespect. “Here is a beautiful story,” Raiman began by way of illustration. His eyes twinkled.
“It’s a story that I heard from a CEO of a French subsidiary of a U.S. company. A young engineer who worked in the south of France was sent on a mission to a paper plant in the extreme north of Norway. So he said good-bye to his wife and left for four days wearing loafers. But, once there, in freezing temperatures, he had to buy fur-lined boots. Back in France, he filled in his expense report, including fifty dollars for the boots.”
But before long, “he got the report back with a finance control note: ‘REREAD THE PROCEDURES: CLOTHING CANNOT BE INCLUDED IN THE EXPENSES.’ So the engineer deleted the ‘boots,’ and added three dollars here and