Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [109]
This bit of regimentation is a source of both angst and humor at the Richards Group. A number of people have T-shirts with “8:29:59” emblazoned on them. And when we visited the Richards Group, we were introduced to the employees at what they call a “stairwell”—a short, sometimes raucous meeting held in the four-story stairwell in the center of the office. The employees held a poetry slam in which they attempted to describe the company for their visitors in verse, and more than one of the poems mentioned the mad dash that some people take through the parking lot and the lobby to key in their PINs before the clock strikes 8:30. We take this public ribbing of Richards over the policy as a sign that Richards Groupers see the clocking-in regimen as a quirk rather than a source of serious resentment.
At the same time, Richards shares the belief of Zobrist and others that people don’t need to be clocked to get their jobs done. “Some bosses worry they won’t get an honest day’s work from people. They must worry about it, or nobody would make time clocks. But I’ve found that diligence is the rule,” Richards said, “and not because we make it a rule”—except for that rule about what time you get to the office, of course. “Given the tools and the freedom they need to use their gifts, people enjoy working hard… My experience around here has been that if people are imbalanced in their approach to work they are usually imbalanced on the side of working too much … There may very well be some … with a disposition toward goofing off…but the culture pretty well takes care of that…. The diligent majority sets the tone and pace… An open workplace is remarkably self-policing.”6 And yet he makes everyone punch in, and has chores for those who make a habit of missing the morning bell.
Whether this is a blind spot or a pragmatic concession to the habits of his industry is hard to say. It certainly sits oddly with Richards’s talk, in his book and elsewhere, about trusting people to do the right thing. But Stan Richards is not a management philosopher. Some of the liberating leaders in this book are connected directly to one another or through a common intellectual heritage—McGregor’s or Townsend’s—arrived at independently. Richards is one of those who came to his views through a combination of a belief in his fellow man, as expressed above, and a desire to remove obstacles to doing the work that he loved. When we asked Robert McDermott or Rich Teerlink what drove them to do what they did at USAA and Harley, both men talked about their childhoods and their upbringings. Tom Quadracci explained the drive of his brother Harry as a reaction against bitter labor-management disputes he witnessed early in his career in the commercial printing business. Bill Gore, Bob Koski, and Gordon Forward all talked about the exasperation they experienced watching large corporations stifling people’s initiative and creativity.
Stan Richards talked about advertising. “You know,” he told us, “I’ve never thought that any of the things that I’ve done were radical. They just seemed natural.” And then he delivered his bottom line: “I guess the thing that you need to understand is that my total focus is on our work. I was trained as an art director; that’s where I worked for all these years. So everything is about the work. How good can it be? How good can it get? What can I do to keep making the work better and better and