Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [133]
TENDER, LOVING CARE TO MAKE
THE FREEDOM LAST
In 1996, David Kelley sold the majority of his stake in IDEO to Steel-case, which then went public. But according to Kelley, neither this change of ownership nor the transfer of his CEO duties in 2000 to Tim Brown ever prevented IDEO from operating as an independent unit and preserving its culture for the past thirty years. Rich Teerlink took Harley public in 1986 and then spent a decade liberating it. He stepped down in 1999 and today, Harley is on its third “liberating” CEO. Jim Ziemer, the current CEO, recognizes that “it takes initially a visionary to say that there is a different way.”7 But Ziemer is not shy about making a bold comparison to the culture Teerlink built: “It is like a religion, it is spiritual. You’ve got to believe in it and act like it’s a religion … Sometimes, maybe, command and control is great, but … if you don’t have the same leader, then it does not sustain itself. If it is a religion, it can sustain itself.”
Ziemer, who started at Harley as a union member, is not exactly a priest. But just like Kelley and Davids, he is a keeper of a culture that “needs maintenance and tender, loving care to keep it alive.” He does forty town halls a year and walks through the shop floor asking what people need; he gets worried if he’s not being stalked by employees: “I’d wonder if we had a new manager who said, ‘Don’t talk to Mr. Ziemer.’ I’d be suspicious.” Just as Les Lewis noticed in Gore, Ziemer is convinced that “you need continued care [for the culture] as well as the training” for new people coming from the “how” world. Harley puts every new hire though a six-month training program so that they have their own opportunity to doubt, ask questions, and absorb Harley’s culture. Ziemer, by the way, started as a disbeliever. He admits now that at the beginning he didn’t know why Teerlink’s project was good and just went “along with the party.”
Bob Koski, who founded Sun Hydraulics in 1971, took it public in 1998. The company’s free culture persists despite the pressures of public ownership and two changes of the guard at the top of the company. His family still owns a minority stake. Koski himself passed away on October 11, 2008. But as of the middle of 2008, Koski, though ill, was still going to work regularly at Sun. He had equipped the company with a roster of executives who share his views about how a company ought to treat its people. The documents he left behind, from the original business plan reproduced in chapter 5 to his shareholder letters, offer a record of his vision for the company and its culture.
When we met him, Koski didn’t like our use of the word “freedom.” When asked why, he answered in a Socratic way, with a question: “How do you get the butterflies to fly in formation?”8 Koski founded a high-precision manufacturing company. Its lifeblood is building hydraulic valves and manifolds that perform better and more consistently than the competition’s. That means getting things exactly right, over and over. Sun is very good at that. It is so good, in fact, that even its rejects outperform most of the competition’s parts. In other words, Sun lives or dies by consistency, reproducibility, and uniformity. So when Bob Koski asked about getting the butterflies to fly in formation, he was soft-pedaling his antithesis: Sun can’t afford butterflies in its plants, no matter how orderly they are. But that doesn’t mean Koski wanted automatons, or Henry Ford’s mythical “pair of hands,” either. What Koski wanted were adults. When you go to work at Sun,