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the managers took comfort in this view of the company and had reason to believe their managerial approach was just fine. If not for some of Zobrist’s accidental little discoveries, such as the exorbitant true cost of replacing a pair of gloves or the nightmare of repairing an imaginary lawn mower, even he might have continued to run the plant in the old way. Seeing the situation dialectically—from both sides—he started with changes that did not threaten those managers. Instead, he sent them to various seminars on alternative management approaches. Jacques Raiman did the same at GSI, sending his managers as far as the United States for it. Even later, when Zobrist took decisive action, beginning with his speech about FAVI-as-prostitute, he was adamant that a liberating leader should “never, ever leave anyone on the side of the road.”

Rather than write somebody off because they’ve become a counterproductive force or are resisting change, he said, “It’s necessary to have the courage to say: ‘I am ashamed, sorry. But during many years I let you do inept things that didn’t allow you to fulfill yourself.’” And “courage” is the right word—rare indeed is the manager who will blame himself for the underperformance of a direct report. But notice what Zobrist gets as a result: He takes an impossible task—exhorting a suspicious and unconstructive employee to get on board—and transforms it totally by taking the blame on himself. “I let you do inept things”—if you mean it—puts the listener in the hot seat, because Zobrist has taken the blame on himself. Next, he suggests you make the following offer: “You have all the freedom and all the time to find in this company something much more constructive, first of all for yourself and then, for the common good.” In other words, the one thing you can’t do is to continue to stand in the way of other people doing their jobs. But the rest is up to you. Instead of, first, blaming the manager for doing a bad job, and, second, telling him how to shape up, Zobrist turns the whole encounter on its head: Take the blame yourself and leave the other guy free to figure out how to improve. Note, however, what he doesn’t do in this hypothetical encounter: He does not pretend that unacceptable performance or behavior is acceptable in order to keep the peace, and he does not leave the preservation of the status quo available as an option.

In his twenty-five years with FAVI, Zobrist didn’t dismiss any of the people whose bureaucratic jobs became useless in the freedom-based company. He did, however, fire three people—within a matter of hours—for bad faith and mistreatment of other employees. As Bob Davids would say, “The swift sword cuts clean,” a mantra he employed when a person would become increasingly dictatorial and when he “realized that the rest of the people were waiting to see how long [Davids] will let this exist.”15

Wisdom has also been helpful after the liberation.

Zobrist, who based his own style of dialectical wisdom on the writings of Douglas McGregor, Chinese tradition, and his own hands-on liberation experience, wrote that the overall principle guiding his action in the company after he achieved the “break” and built a freedom-based environment was that of the good Chinese prince mentioned in chapter 7: “To act without acting is a laissez-faire that does not mean doing nothing, but means creating conditions in which things happen by themselves.”16 How liberating leaders used yet another paradox—“acting without acting”—in order to maintain the freedom environment is the issue we turn to now.

13

THE ULTIMATE

PARADOX

The Culture of Happiness as a Path to World-Class Performance

My job now is the keeper of the culture. That’s my job. I do it by talking to everybody every day: “Hello, how are you, how’s it going, what do you need?”

—BOB DAVIDS1

DAVID KELLEY—THE founder, chairman, and former CEO of the Palo Alto, California–based industrial-design company IDEO, has never met Bob Davids, but he unconsciously echoed him when he said, in answer to a question, “I view my job as maintaining