Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [131]
And yet, for all the passion that Bill Gore himself brought to this question, the bean counters seemed to be gaining ground in recent years. “I am, I have been, for the last fifteen years, the lone wolf, the lone voice on this,” Les said. New hires—especially, in Lewis’s view, those who had come from other large companies—saw Gore’s commitment to 100 percent on-time delivery as quaint, not to say uneconomical.
Gore, the company, was approaching fifty years in business when we met Les Lewis. And in many ways the continuity of its culture—over three generations and counting—was remarkable. But for all that, here was Les Lewis fighting a lonely rear-guard action on an unwritten business principle that had once been central to the company’s very identity. For Lewis, this was symptomatic of a certain drift in the younger associates’ understanding of Gore’s culture, and he spoke about bringing in old hands and retired associates to talk to the next generation, tell war stories, and try to imbue in them something of the spirit of those old days.
Everyone appreciates a good, well-told war story, so it wasn’t surprising to hear Lewis say that younger associates were “hungry” for those tales. But whether they can be wholly effective in conveying the tradition is another question.
It would be strange indeed if a company that was founded by a man who liked to ask, “What mistakes have you made lately? None? You haven’t been taking enough risks,” stopped taking risks itself. So some evolution and reinterpretation of corporate tradition is not only inevitable but healthy. Each of these companies was founded or transformed based on the wisdom that the person at the top of the organization didn’t have all the answers and that IDEO-style prototyping is necessary to pull in the ideas of others.
ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
That said, when a company is doing things differently from what people may have experienced at other firms—or even throughout their upbringing and schooling—some sort of reeducation is needed to maintain the most important pieces of that culture. W. L. Gore & Associates has done that for more than fifty years, in part by the very words they use to talk about the company’s culture. The “associates” and the “sponsors” and the “credibility bucket” and the “waterline” are all reminders that Gore is different. This language is off-putting to outsiders and newcomers—some of whom leave the company rather quickly—but this is not necessarily a disadvantage. Its goal is not to alienate outsiders, but rather to alienate everyone from traditional ways of thinking about responsibility and authority inside a company. The language Gore uses captures its culture’s unwritten rules, key principles, and practices. If Lewis succeeds in explaining the principles of “fairness to the customer” and “commitment” to his younger colleagues, they will find for themselves the appropriate balance between 100 percent on-time delivery and the cost-reduction on inventory. It is not foolproof, of course. No tool is. And as the meanings of the words used can themselves shift over time, it requires eternal vigilance.
Gore’s focus on language is just one possible technique for preserving and transmitting a company’s culture over time, especially after a change of leadership or control. Not all of our companies share Gore’s focus on using language to transmit culture. Some do it through social events and rituals, such as Quad/Graphics’ annual musical, performed by all the top executives in front of the employees and their families. The executive cast of the show rehearses