Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [128]
Bob Koski of Sun Hydraulics said that a liberated corporate culture is for “adults only”—for people who “are good judges of them-selves…[and] responsible for themselves…[because here] they can’t blame someone else for their nonperformance.”18 Liisa Joronen agreed that it is not for everyone and very tough on some because freedom comes with responsibility, and because a happy workplace demands self-discipline.
Not everyone is cut out for a liberated company.19 Next we’ll look at the challenge of sustaining a freedom-based culture over the years in the face of turnover among leaders and frontline employees alike.
14
BUTTERFLIES IN FORMATION
Sustaining Freedom Over Time
You can’t step in the same river twice.
—HERACLITUS
OUR FOCUS ON liberating leaders may itself appear paradoxical, when freedom in the workplace begins with an understanding of the centrality of frontline people to a company’s success and performance. This paradox arises because everything we have learned by studying these companies pointed in the same direction: The success or failure of the liberation campaign ultimately rested on the shoulders of the man or woman at the top—the leader’s values, creativity, and wisdom were the key elements to the success of the project.
Even so, this reliance on a single, central figure does raise an important question: If it takes a leader with extraordinary qualities to build a free company, is it possible for that environment to outlive its creator? Can a liberated workplace be sustained, or is it the kind of happy accident that must invariably give way to bureaucratization over time?
This was, in a sense, Max Weber’s bureaucratic ideal: replacing personal preferences with impersonal policies and procedures. Freedom in the workplace, on the other hand, harnesses all the information, insight, and actions that cannot be captured by rules laid down in advance. While a rule-bound mode of governance attempts to say, “This has worked in the past, so this is how we will do it in the future,” a liberating leader knows that all kinds of valuable information had not been—and will never be—captured in those rules. She knows, moreover, that the desire to codify “what works” into rules is powerful and natural. Gordon Forward, the ex-CEO of Chaparral Steel, illustrates this danger with a story.
One day at Chaparral, a new employee stopped Forward to tell him how impressed he was with all the freedom he found in the company. Gordon thanked him. The employee went on, swept up by his enthusiasm. He thought it was great, for example, that nobody wore a jacket and tie in the office. “Let’s have a policy that nobody wears a tie to work,” the employee proposed.
“If we write that rule,” Forward replied, “I’m going to wear a tie!”1
After telling us this story, he laughed and added, “It’s such a stupid thing to write a rule.” Stupid—unwise, even—but natural. This young employee liked Chaparral’s company culture so much, he wanted to codify it. And this impulse—to turn one’s preferences into rules for everyone else to follow—is a constant danger to be guarded against. This doesn’t mean that there can be no rules. As Gordon Forward notes, Chaparral, a steelmaker, had lots of rules, particularly in the area of safety. These are vital in a business in which one is dealing with three-thousand-degree molten metal. And, as we’ve seen, all liberated companies have some unwritten rules, such as “Don’t produce memos—inform orally” at GSI; or “Consult all the affected colleagues before making a decision” at Gore and IDEO. The key is to distinguish between the informal rules that arise spontaneously to signify some shared habit—a local tradition—and those that formally impose one person’s preferences