Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [14]
Though very different, all of them had leaders who were unwavering in their commitment to the creation of a corporate culture that freed up the initiative of everyone on the payroll. Bill Gore and a series of leaders he helped nurture manifest that commitment by small daily acts—offering help and encouragement when associates’ actions live up to the company’s principles and asking, as Bill Gore did with Lewis, “Do you have a minute?” when their actions violate them. Some, such as Stan Richards of the Richards Group, have literally broken down barriers. Richards changed the physical geometry of his Dallas office so that nothing stood in the way of face-to-face human contact. Each of these responses reflects the unique challenges posed by their particular fields and their starting points. But whether they were built from the ground up to be different, like the Richards Group, Gore, and Sun Hydraulics, or were transformed after a long period of underperformance, like USAA, Harley, and FAVI, they all hold lessons on the power of freeing the potential that inheres in one’s people.
Freeing that potential isn’t easy. It requires a firm commitment to the idea that, taken together, your people know a great deal more about what your company is capable of than any single employee or—for that matter—CEO ever could. If you believe that, then it becomes easier to understand what Jean-François Zobrist meant when he said that his goal, as CEO, is “to do as little as possible.” But to fully understand what is wrong with the “how” companies’ approach to running a business and whether it’s possible to change it, it helps to understand how we got here.
2
ARE YOU MANAGING FOR
THE “THREE PERCENT”?
Exceptional Companies Do Not Confuse
the Exception with the Rule
WHAT JEAN-FRANÇOIS Zobrist calls “how” companies are also known as hierarchical, bureaucratic, or command-and-control companies. And, unfortunately, they are known all too well by too many of us. These terms describe, with slightly different emphases, the structures that are common to most large organizations—the (sometimes long) chain of command, procedure-driven decision making, or top-down control. But those structures, in turn, emerged in support of the real core of “how” companies: the assumption that the people on the frontlines need to be controlled and told how to do their own work. Underlying this core assumption are deep beliefs held by management about human nature. When management—often implicitly—believes that people don’t want to work or to learn much, it will naturally assume that people have to be told and controlled. Given this assumption, it makes perfect sense to put in place hierarchies that give authority to the superiors to “tell” and control. And from there, it’s only natural to routinize much of this telling and controlling through policies and procedures.
This “natural order of things” emerged—as we’ll see in the next chapter—during the Industrial Revolution, when firms first had to employ mostly illiterate workers with rural backgrounds. But it’s important to acknowledge that this type of organization permitted many “how” companies to perform well, not only back then but throughout the past two centuries.
Indeed, in many ways the performance of “how” companies has been remarkable. According to the economic historian Angus Maddison, these traditional organizations helped propel newly industrialized nations to rates of economic growth that were unprecedented in human history. This growth, in turn, allowed a substantial portion of the people in these countries to live the materially comfortable lives that had previously been reserved to