Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [2]
2. Start openly and actively sharing your vision of the company so people will “own” it. But don’t do this before Step 1 because people who are not treated as equals will leave you alone with your vision.
3. Stop trying to motivate people. That’s right. Instead, build an environment that allows people to grow and self-direct—and let them motivate themselves. If they understand the vision from Step 2, they’ll take care of the rest if you let them.
4. Stay alert. To keep your company free, become the culture keeper. In this role, as liberating leader Bob Davids says, “One drop of urine in the soup is too much—and you can’t get it out.”2 The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
These principles are universal, but each leader in this book had to apply them to his own unique set of circumstances—and you will, too. In other words, this book cannot give you a formula for applying the above principles to any particular situation. Freedom is, after all, the enemy of formulas—if we knew, or you knew, every situation that would arise and how to deal with it, you would not need freedom—or your employees, for that matter. You’d have all the answers already.
This paradox was captured by Robert Townsend, one of the best, most profound, early thinkers on the problem of freedom and organization. Townsend was also a liberating leader in his own right. One of his aphorisms was, “At best, a job description freezes the job…
At worst, they’re prepared by personnel people who can’t write and don’t understand the jobs. Then they’re not only expensive to prepare and regularly revise, but they’re important morale-sappers.”3 Likewise, if your liberation campaign isn’t flexible, it’s probably a little short on the freedom thing.
Townsend got his start as a leader at American Express in the 1950s, which at the time was a traveler’s check company. He introduced charge cards to the business, ingeniously describing them to reluctant top executives as a “cross between a passport and a traveler’s check.” He also drove AmEx’s foray into banking. More important, though, from the moment he became a manager he practiced a kind of leadership based on radical freedom for his subordinates. As he would later say, “As a new manager, remove everything you didn’t like when you were a subordinate and implement what you missed.”4 But as the head of only one division at American Express, Townsend could not transform the whole company. That opportunity came in 1962, when he was offered the chance to become chief executive officer of Avis, which was at the time a moribund company that hadn’t turned a profit in thirteen years. In just three years he liberated Avis and unleashed the initiative and action of its thousands of employees. By 1965 Avis had become one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States—its “We try harder” motto comes from those times.
That year ITT, one of the most acquisitive conglomerates of the 1960s, noticed the turnaround Townsend had accomplished and bought the company. Townsend resigned and, five years later, published Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits. The book’s aphorisms and advice, arranged in alphabetical order, describe what might be called an early version of a liberation campaign. It opens with “A—Advertising: Fire the whole advertising department and your old agency,” and it closes with “W—Wearing out your welcome: Nobody should be CEO of anything for more than five or six years.” It would ultimately spend several weeks as a number one New York Times best seller and remains in print today. The Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management at the University of Pennsylvania still ranks it the number one business book “every manager must read.” For all that, Townsend’s advice has remained somewhat less than universally applied since Up the Organization was published.
One person in particular who might have been surprised by this was Douglas McGregor, a professor at the Massachusetts