Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [36]
Gore’s Les Lewis was disturbed a few years back when he discovered that on-time delivery performance was slipping.4 He made some inquiries and learned that some newer people, those with experience at companies with a different vision, had decided that 80 percent performance was acceptable if getting to 100 percent would mean going over budget. Lewis did not view on-time delivery as an economic decision at Gore. It was one of its core principles and an element of its corporate vision—fairness to the customer. The numbers revealed a vision-sharing problem, which Lewis then set about correcting by reminding the associates in question how fairness fit into Gore’s vision: “The success of our enterprise in making money and having fun rests on our ability to invent, sell, and service products our customers value.” Always delivering on time is part of the value that Gore provides to its customers. Lewis, of course, had learned the same lesson himself years earlier when Bill Gore sat him down for his impromptu lecture on the “Formula for Failure”—when all he wanted to do was save a buck.
Freedom inside a company isn’t anarchy when it is bounded by what Davids calls his people’s “charge,” or by Zobrist’s “why” question. Both amount to the same thing—the company’s strategic vision, which employees bring to fruition through their best actions. A liberating leader’s first two tasks are to build a corporate environment in which all the people are free to make decisions, while ensuring that they understand, own, and aim toward that vision. This second task—as we saw with the Chardonnay—is a tougher one for the liberating leader.
OWNING THE COMPANY’S WORLD-CLASS VISION
Getting people to emotionally own a corporate vision is a long—indeed, never-ending—task for a liberating leader. Fortunately, in freedom-based companies the vision is always world-class, which facilitates its acceptance. As Zobrist put it, people desire and own dreams more easily than mundane goals—no one jumps out of bed enthused by the goal of increasing market share by 2 percent. The task starts with the first encounter with a prospective employee.
First, Davids—like other liberating leaders—makes sure that every applicant knows the corporate vision before she is hired. That way, if she doesn’t agree with it she can opt out right away. Sometimes, in her zeal to land the job, a person will agree with everything, vision and all, without really thinking it through. Vertex is a Berwyn, Pennsylvania-based six-hundred-employee-strong company whose vision is global market leadership in advanced tax software and related services. To make sure that all his new hires think this vision through, Jeff Westphal, the company’s owner and CEO, tells them on their first day, “Welcome to Vertex. You are free to leave.” And it works.
“One of my most wonderful days at work was saying good-bye to one of our best employees,” recounted Westphal.5 “I gave a speech years ago when we were working on our vision for the first time, and there was a woman who had been a long-time employee, a wonderful woman and a fine employee. After we talked about this and she engaged in the vision process, she came to me and said, ‘Jeff, I have to go. I want to carve birds, it’s my hobby, but that’s what I love to do. I like working here, but I love that more and I want to try to make a business out of that.’ And I said, ‘Kathleen, God bless you.’ I gave her a big hug, had a little lunch for her, and off she went. Because I knew I was serving her true needs, not