Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [42]
Westphal accepted the idea that opened the path to the company’s growth. He admits that if they had revamped the failed project as he initially wanted, Vertex would have been ruined: “It’s a darn good thing we did, because we barely got ourselves into a position in time to seize the growth opportunity in ERP that really put the company on the map. Had we not done it, we probably wouldn’t be in business today.”
Of course, that insight came later. But at the time, how did he feel leaving a major strategic decision to his team? “I was not diminished because it wasn’t my idea,” he explained. “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 with the incremental power of six hundred brains. It’s not about who has the best idea, it’s about us having the best idea. But it was hard at first because you feel vulnerable.”
Note that listening, by itself, did not trigger Westphal’s decision to launch his liberation campaign. Rather, it was the reality Westphal discovered after he started listening that exasperated him and triggered his decision.
Seeing Vertex’s performance improve, Westphal—now emancipated both from the telling “how” style and his ego—began to see clearly that the environment inside his company was what he called the “rule of the jungle.” It encouraged people to stick to their own perspectives, to push decisions favoring their own interests and thus create permanent conflicts, and then to go to the “boss” to resolve these conflicts. It was a hierarchical, conflict-ridden environment with all the stress and disengagement that entails. Similar to the exasperating issue at home, Westphal saw that the never-ending conflicts at the workplace stemmed from telling instead of listening. He decided to transform the “how” company into a liberated one, encouraging people to listen to one another, to agree on a common business purpose reflecting the company’s vision, and to come up with the best decisions and actions to achieve this shared purpose.
After fifteen years of effort, Westphal figured that Vertex’s culture was more than halfway to his ideal but needs “another ten or fifteen years” to reach it. Yet, despite this severe self-appraisal, he was eager to provide an illustration of how far he had already traveled on the road to freedom: “I remember feeling like I had to have…the right answer all the time. And now … I know that I just have to have the right question. It doesn’t matter where the answer comes from.”
Many of our liberating leaders experienced similar moments of exasperation with the “how” culture. Stan Richards, the owner and CEO of the Dallas-based Richards Group, the largest independent ad agency in the United States, reached the point of exasperation with the way the environment in traditional agencies stifled creative ideas and produced interdepartmental strife. The sectarian conflict between “accounts” people and “creatives” was so bad that Richards compared it to Northern Ireland, where physical walls were built in the middle of streets in Belfast to keep Protestants and Catholics apart. These firms, Richards says, were like “Ulster, with regular business hours.” That experience made him quit the world of traditional ad agencies and start his own freedom-based company.
Bob Koski was the founder and longtime CEO of Sarasota, Florida-based Sun Hydraulics, a leading manufacturer of high-performance hydraulic valves. But he started Sun only after he became exasperated by the antagonistic labor relations at his previous job. Koski would spend a lot of time walking around the plant hearing the concerns of the workers. When he predicted that the