Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [13]
This is the difference between a “how” company and a “why” company. Christine, a night janitor who had probably never taken a company car on company business in her life, saw a chance to do some good for the company, and she took it. As Zobrist put it, “Facing a company problem, she is not a ‘janitor,’ she is ‘the company.’” Most companies hope in vain for that attitude to take root among their employees. In fact, on the off chance an employee at a “how” firm had gone to those lengths on the company’s behalf, one of two things would likely have happened. In the worst case, Christine would have been sanctioned for unauthorized use of company property, not to mention leaving her assigned duties. But only slightly better is the alternative, in which the company, so surprised at the lengths to which this janitor went, makes a hero out of her. Zobrist did neither. “When you neither punish nor reward people’s actions, those actions become normal, banal,” Zobrist explained. “She didn’t think she was doing something exceptional. Everyone here facing a problem and having a solution, just goes and does it. No need to tell, either before—for permission—nor after, for thanks.” Then, with a satisfied smile, Zobrist added: “By the way, thanks to her initiative the auditor increased our quality rating by 10 percent!”
The time between Zobrist’s encounter with Alfred outside the supply closet and Christine’s impromptu nighttime drive was just two years. But in those two years, Zobrist had already achieved a remarkable turnaround in the habits of many of FAVI’s employees. The subsequent years have seen innumerable acts of everyday heroism by FAVI’s liberated employees. There was the time that an order could not be delivered because the truck needed to deliver the products did not arrive. The employees in question—together with Zobrist—hired a helicopter to get the order to the customer as promised. Or the worker on the factory floor who told us that when one of his customers had a problem with a product, he, together with a coworker, immediately left the factory and drove to Germany to address the issue—without prior authorization, bien sûr. When we asked him why, he shrugged. It seemed like the right—even normal—thing to do.
Most companies say they dream of people who can develop high-margin, innovative products in their spare time, or who look for creative ways to satisfy customer demands without thinking twice about it. But the truth is that these people are all around you right now—the technician who seems unconcerned with product quality, the sales rep who appears uninterested in clients’ innovative suggestions, and, yes, the janitor who looks like he’s never been interested in anything—who looks invisible, even. They just need to be set free from the bonds that hold them back. Our liberated companies have discovered the secrets to doing just that.
By freeing the initiative and gifts of every single employee on their payroll, they have succeeded where their competition has failed; they have taken on entrenched incumbents many times their size and have, in many cases, grown beyond their founders’ wildest dreams. Some, like six-hundred-person-strong FAVI, are relatively small. Others, like the insurance giant USAA, with twenty-three thousand employees, are much larger. They exist in services and in the industrial sector. Some, like Harley-Davidson, are publicly traded and are dominated by unionized workforces. Surprisingly, Harley’s main reason for going public in 1986, according to then-CEO Rich Teerlink, was to be able to launch a liberation campaign, which would otherwise have been blocked by the banks that controlled the company at that time: