Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [141]
The modern entrepreneur exemplifies the ancient artisan’s desires for recognition and self-direction; those needs are universal. And yet too often we treat our employees as if they were primarily driven by the need to satisfy their material wants. The liberated companies in this book have succeeded so fantastically because they have tapped into the higher universal needs—and not just of a few “great talents,” but in every corner of the organization.
There are limits to how big an organization can be and still broadly tap into those universal needs. Both common sense and experience tell us this must be true. But whatever that upper bound is, it’s high enough that easily 97 percent of all businesses in the world fall below it. In addition to the 8,000-plus associates at Gore, USAA employs 22,000 people, Quad/Graphics has 12,000 people, Harley-Davidson employs 9,000, and SOL has about 8,000. There are companies that are larger than that, even a lot larger. But not many, and what Gordon Forward said about managing for the 3 percent applies here, too—particularly given the fact that all large corporations are divided into smaller divisions and business units that enjoy a degree of autonomy to arrange their own affairs.
Experience tells us that those higher universal needs are felt more acutely in some people than in others. Bob Koski estimated that as many as one-fourth of the people who seek a job at Sun Hydraulics cannot adjust to the level of both freedom and responsibility that they find when they get there. Those people are “free to leave”—an expression that Bob Koski used, unwittingly echoing Jeff Westphal. But as we’ve already seen, oppressive, bureaucratic corporate environments also drive people out—birds hate cages. Kevin Grogan recalls how Chaparral’s Texas mill would occasionally lose employees to unionized plants in the area offering two to three dollars an hour more. But, Grogan says, “they would come back and say ‘Money isn’t everything.’ It’s not what they’re looking for.”
The low employee turnover at liberated companies suggests that fewer people are scared off by “too much” freedom than are turned off by bureaucracy and lack of control over their own jobs.
Suppose, however, that this is not true—that some significant portion of the working population really prefers to be a cog in the wheels of corporate bureaucracy. Apologists for feudalism used to argue the same way about the average man and his ability to govern himself. But suppose that, when it comes to work, it is true for at least some people. If you are running a business, and you have to choose a system of organization, would you pick the one that would naturally self-select for people who wanted nothing more than to punch a clock and collect a paycheck, or the one that would self-select for those seeking satisfaction of their universal needs to motivate themselves to act for the best of the company? Which system would you choose? To put it another way, which group would you want your competitors to end up with?
KNOWING WHAT YOU DO NOT KNOW
There is no system of organizing or running a company that is foolproof. We mean that literally: Just as a fool with a tool is still a fool, a fool with a well-run company—liberated or not—can drive it into the ground with alarming rapidity. Even very smart people can act foolishly, and it takes a wise person not to do so occasionally. So we have declined to offer a seven-step plan for liberating any company, anywhere. It seems more useful to describe instead