Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [143]
A fragment survives from the famously cryptic pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. It is quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Heraclitus’s paradox was that, while the river may always be within the same banks, it is forever flowing and changing, and what is true about it in one moment may be wrong the next. Imagine trying to fish in that river under the rules of “how” corporate organization: Standing on the banks, an employee spots a fish amid the currents. If you’re lucky, the employee asks his supervisor: “Can I cast the lure?” We say, “If you’re lucky” because looking for fish might not be that person’s job. Maybe he chops wood along the river or mows the lawn on the banks. But say you are lucky, and he asks his boss, who asks his boss, and so on up to the senior fishing committee. Even if that chain of command is relatively short and the answer delivered efficiently, the odds are that when the message is finally relayed back down to the water’s edge, the fish will have moved on. That assumes that somebody else, who was free to fish and didn’t have to ask for permission to cast his line, hasn’t caught it in the meantime.
The CEO, the man at the other end of that chain of command who sees the river from afar out the window of his corner office, simply has no way of knowing how many fish swim past his company every day. There is no system of controls for ensuring that those opportunities are acted upon, or even that they are learned about in time. The river is constantly flowing, and nobody knows all of it at any one moment. As Jeff Westphal of Vertex put it, “My measure is the net performance of the organization, so we can either get an itty-bitty bit of leverage out of the incremental power of my little pea brain or we can get a ton of leverage by the incremental power of six hundred brains.” Jeff’s wisdom lies in knowing that however much the man at the top knows about the business, he knows less than all those people working for him put together. This is true even of the most knowledgeable, most qualified CEO there is—because the river is always flowing. Free your people, and you’ll be surprised at what they fish out of it.
Acknowledgments
This book has two names on the cover, but it could not have been written or published without contributions, large and small, from a great many people.
Our thanks and gratitude go out first to Brian’s young family. Without the patient support of Samantha, Luke, James, and Aletheia through the long years of this project’s incubation, research, and writing, you would not be reading this now.
We also owe a great debt of gratitude to all of the people who work at the companies we write about in this book. While that group is too large to list by individual names, we could not have written it without the access, insights, and wisdom that they all provided in great abundance.
Unique acknowledgement is due though to a special group that became the focus of this book: Bob Davids, Gordon Forward, Liisa Joronen, David Kelley, Jacques Raiman, Stan Richards, Richard Teer-link, Jeff Westphal, Jean-Francois Zobrist. The acumen and perspicacity of these liberating leaders helped crystallize our own thoughts and very often gave us the vocabulary to put them on paper.
Two of the liberating leaders we met, Bob Koski and Robert McDermott, passed away before we could finish writing this book. The world is poorer for their passing; we only hope that in some small way we have done justice to their memories. Each was a prince among men, generous of spirit, abounding with good humor and good sense. May they rest in peace.
Two other liberating leaders—Bill Gore and Harry Quadracci—passed away before we started working on it. We’d like to thank Burt Chase and Les Lewis of Gore and Joel and Tom Quadracci and Karl Fritchen of Quad, who shared with us their memories and their thoughts on leadership.
Any frailties in relaying the insights of all these people are due entirely to our own shortcomings,