Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [153]
14: BUTTERFLIES IN FORMATION
1. Personal interview, September 25, 2007.
2. Personal interview, May 20, 2008.
3. Personal interview, May 22, 2008. All the quotes in this chapter from employees at Chaparral’s Petersburg mill were gathered in personal interviews on that day. In July 2007, Gerdau Ameristeel bought out Chaparral Steel for $4.2 billion, and at the time of our visit, Chaparral was still being “integrated” into its new parent company. The fate of the culture that helped make Chaparral such an attractive prize to Gerdau cannot be predicted as of this writing.
4. Harry Quadracci was strongly opposed to unionization of Quad/Graphics, having witnessed divisive strikes at an earlier employer. For this, Quad has earned the attention and ire of organized labor, but so far no one has succeeded in organizing a Quad facility, which speaks to the Quadraccis’ success in maintaining a fruitful relationship with their employees.
5. Frank Shipper and Charles C. Manz, “Employee Self-Management Without Formally Designated Teams: An Alternative Road to Empowerment,” Organizational Dynamics 20, no. 3 (1992): pp. 48–61.
6. Personal interview, May 18, 2008.
7. Personal interview, August 17, 2005. Ziemer retired in early 2009.
8. Personal interview, May 20, 2008.
9. Personal interview, November 26, 2008.
10. Personal interview, May 22, 2008.
11. Personal interview, May 22, 2008.
12. Personal interview, September 8, 2008.
13. Zobrist, La belle histoire de FAVI, pp. 107–8.
14. One Gore associate, a first-generation immigrant from India, joked with us that his status-conscious family back in the old country was very concerned that he’d been at the company over a decade and was still a mere “associate.”
15. Townsend, Up the Organization, p. 111.
16. Townsend, “Further ‘Up the Organization,’” pp. 86, 89.
17. Jean-François Zobrist, seminar given at ESCP Europe Business School, Paris, February 18, 2009.
18. A study of 6,772 large “how” firms from 40 industries showed that only 2 to 5 percent sustain a competitive advantage over a 10-year period, and only 4 firms sustain it over 20 years. More, about 99 percent of firms—large and small—disappear over that peroid (C. I. Stubbart and M. B. Knight, “The Case of the Disappearing Firms: Empirical Evidence and Implications,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 27, [2002]: pp. 79–100.)
19. Personal interview, August 15, 2005.
20. See Angus Maddison’s finding, note 1 in chapter 2, that beginning in 1820 and up to 2001, per capita income rose twentyfold in the West. This meant the satisfaction of needs beyond mere material subsistence was no longer limited to a tiny elite. The majority of inhabitants of developed economies could now concern themselves with “higher” universal needs whose pursuit is unique to humans.
21. Title of a paper presented at a conference at MIT on April 9, 1957; reprinted in McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, pp. 341–56.
About the Authors
BRIAN M. CARNEY is a London-based member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal and the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe. In 2009 he won the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary, and in 2003 he won the Bastiat Prize for Journalism for his writings on business and economic affairs. After majoring in philosophy at Yale, he earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Boston University and worked at the Innovations in American Government program at Harvard University before joining the Wall Street Journal in 2000.
ISAAC GETZ, who has Ph.D.s in psychology and management, is a professor at ESCP Europe Business School in Paris and has been a visiting professor at Cornell and Stanford Universities and at the University of Massachusetts. Isaac conducts and publishes research on innovation, leadership, and corporate transformation for excellence and growth, and speaks on