Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [12]
Many CEOs have great things to say about their companies’ corporate cultures. Many also claim to believe that their people are their greatest assets. We suspect that somewhere there is a top-secret executive seminar for CEOs where they are trained to tell their employees that they shouldn’t be afraid to bring problems to their bosses’ attention, and that if they walk into a room with their fly down, they expect an employee to tell them right away.
But the fact is, most employees don’t believe a word of it. Sometimes it’s the little things that give the bosses away. The CEO will say she’s open to new ideas. And then she’ll direct employees to a special-purpose internal website—a high-tech “suggestion box”—where those ideas go to die, to be read by an assistant charged with sending a respectful reply and ignoring the recommendation, or wind up examined, filtered, and mostly rejected by some duly appointed “suggestion committee.”
FAVI and the rest of the companies in this book really are different. They prove it—to their people most of all—in ways big and small. When Zobrist says that your only job is to keep the clients happy, he proves it by eliminating the measurement of everything else. The results, as seen in the foundry’s performance numbers, are remarkable. But when viewed from “down below,” through the eyes of those employees, the effects are more remarkable still.
THE JANITOR WHO IMPRESSED A CLIENT
It was 1985, two years after Zobrist became CEO. Christine, a night janitor at FAVI, was doing her job after everyone else had gone home when, at 8:30 p.m., the phone in the plant rang. Christine didn’t know it, but the man at the other end of the phone was an auditor from Fiat, an important new customer for FAVI. He had just landed at the airport in Paris and was expecting someone from FAVI to pick him up and drive him up to Picardy, ninety minutes away, where he had an appointment at FAVI first thing in the morning to ensure that the plant was meeting Fiat’s quality standards.
Christine, upon hearing that the man on the other end of the line was a visitor expecting a pickup at the airport, arranged a meeting point and hung up the phone. Zobrist picked up the story: “I had waited until 7 p.m. on the evening the auditor was due to arrive, thinking that he perhaps had some difficulty. And then I went home. Imagine my surprise when I saw him waiting in my office the next day at 8:30 a.m. He said, ‘Something very strange happened to me yesterday.’”9
The Fiat auditor explained that, being in a hurry, he had not been able to call in advance (there were no cell phones back then). When he arrived at the airport and found no one from FAVI waiting for him, he called the company. To his surprise, a feminine voice answered. He explained that he was late, but that in principle the company had told him someone would pick him up. The woman who had answered the phone came, retrieved him from the airport, drove him to his hotel, and wished him good night.
“The funny thing,” the auditor told Zobrist, “is that she was very kind, very polite, but she didn’t seem to have the slightest idea who I was or what company I was from.” Even funnier, though, was that Zobrist could not for the life of him figure out who the mystery chauffeur of this important visitor was.
After the meeting, the CEO called a few people and tracked down Christine. When she had heard the man’s story, Christine had simply taken the keys of one of the company cars—keys that always hang near the entrance to the plant so that they are available to any employee who needs a car. She then went to the airport, brought the visitor to the hotel—and came back to finish the cleaning she had interrupted three hours earlier.
What’s more, she had seen no need to tell anybody about her trip. She was an employee with a job of her own to do, who had nonetheless taken three hours out of her evening to