Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [140]
BIRDS FLY AWAY FROM CAGES
This situation is, unfortunately, also sustainable for long periods of time, especially in very large “how” companies with a high capacity to both lobby and borrow. But in the normal course of events, talented people see opportunities that their employer is not acting on, and they leave to pursue those themselves, as Rich Teerlink’s Dutch immigrant father did.19 A foreman with International Harvester, he partnered with four other workers, bought his former employer’s old equipment at the junkyard, and opened up his own shop. The partners quickly adopted all the ideas they had been unable to implement while at Harvester, and in ten years the company grew to become one of the top three in their niche industry and was written up in Fortune magazine. Some of these start-ups turn out, of course, to be dead ends, but a smaller number turn into blockbusters. And a few of these inadvertent spin-offs become monsters that eventually threaten the parent company itself. As is often said, these companies will ultimately hear their employee’s ideas—when that employee has gone to work for the competition.
Sun Hydraulics, Quad/Graphics, Richards Group, SOL, and Gore are products of just this kind of attrition. No company can pursue every opportunity, and some people will strike out on their own just because they can and because it suits them. But yet another distinguishing feature of liberated companies, as we’ve seen, is their low rate of employee turnover. In every case in which data is available and meaningful comparisons can be made, these liberated companies have turnover rates well below average. Employee loyalty is a big advantage when it comes to sustaining a culture of whatever sort: It means more stable interpersonal relationships, institutional knowledge, and levels of expertise within the company. But this loyalty is an even bigger advantage for sustaining a free culture simply because the latter relies essentially on unwritten rules, on tradition, and on its keepers. Of course, very low turnover has a flip side: Companies need fresh blood. For liberated companies, though, it’s less of a danger because they typically grow fast and hire a lot—still 15 percent annually at Gore, which already has more than eight thousand associates. And these companies make it easy for people to leave both because they genuinely want them to work at the place that best satisfies their needs and because they seek boomerangs, who are tremendous culture keepers, like Les Lewis at Gore. All the impartial rule making in the world won’t sustain a company culture if you can’t keep the people you need coming back to the office day after day.
When Max Weber wrote of the need for a bureaucracy to discharge the “official business of administration … precisely, unambiguously, continuously, and with as much speed as possible,” he overstated the precision, lack of ambiguity, continuity, and speed of the bureaucratic system. It is possible to program a computer to run in the way that Weber described, but centuries of corporate organization have not yet succeeded in similarly programming people or organizations to behave as according to an algorithm.
People remain stubbornly human, despite the attempts of visionaries from Josiah Wedgwood to Weber and others to correct that fact or to design it out of our ways of running a business. A liberating leader—unsurprisingly—redefines this problem and takes the opposite approach. Rather than pushing against the impulses, desires, and needs that make us human and animate us in every other aspect of our lives, he tries to get them rowing in his direction. Men and women worked, invented, struggled, and