Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [130]
This enforced uniformity would not sit well with all liberating leaders. But it is consistent with a principle that they would all embrace the need to eliminate outward signs of unequal status. The assault on status symbols was vital to the original liberation campaign at all the companies we studied. Some of them went farther than others in this respect: Quad, for example, has reserved parking spaces for some executives. Frontline people, when asked about them, told us that the reserved parking didn’t bother them too much. It was an inconsistency with the single-status culture of the company, but not, they felt, a fatal flaw.4
By the same token, preventing status symbols from creeping back in over time—especially after a change of executive control or ownership—is critical to sustaining the free workplace. After such a change, these symbols are not by themselves enough to ensure that workers are both able to act freely and feel as if they are. As Gordon Forward’s tale of the ties makes clear, it is all too easy for a new generation to accept the form of these changes while failing to grasp their real meaning. If this is not corrected, one of two mistakes is likely to follow: As in the case of Forward’s enthusiastic young employee, a freedom can ossify into a formal rule. In that case, its benefits are lost. The enforcers of the once-informal rule become akin to the monkeys in the hosing experiment described in chapter 3. None of them knows any longer why you can’t climb those stairs, but they do know to beat up any poor monkey who tries.
Alternatively, the practice in question is modified or abandoned because the underlying rationale for it is not understood by the next generation. Without that understanding, the natural tendency is to focus only on the accountable costs of the existing policy or practice.
MEANING OF WORDS AND MAINTENANCE
OF TRADITION
Les Lewis of W. L. Gore & Associates spoke to us about this danger in a different and more serious context than mere clothing. Lewis, you will recall, had been with Gore almost since the beginning. And when we met him, he was perhaps the second longest serving employee still with the company. As such, he saw himself as “flag bearer,” and he lamented that some of the relatively new hires didn’t see the point of some of the “values,” in Lewis’s words, that the company’s associates took for granted in the early days.
As noted in chapter 4, Bill Gore took on-time delivery seriously. So seriously, according to Lewis, that “he actually raised his voice” when someone suggested “that it was okay to have 85 percent on-time delivery.” Many businesses, most in fact, view this question as an economic decision—a trade-off between the inventory costs and the delivery level. Zobrist’s story of hiring the helicopter to complete a delivery is only the most extreme example of how costly it can be to insist on 100 percent performance. But for Bill Gore, delivering on time wasn’t about the economics, at least not in the way the accountants would measure it. “Bill Gore was adamant,” Lewis said, “that when you make a commitment to a customer, when you make a promise date for a delivery, it is a commitment. And the reason he was so adamant about keeping it was that it was a waterline decision. And it is waterline, because you jeopardize our reputation when you don’t deliver on what you promised.” Once you ruin your reputation, he said, “You never get it back.”
This was one of the few topics that could really get Bill Gore “exercised,” in Lewis’s rather delicate phrase. It is no overstatement to say that it is the kind of question that, for Bill Gore, went to the core of what kind of culture he wanted W. L. Gore & Associates to have—a culture in which everyone kept his commitments.