Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [44]
Even showing this restraint is hard. As Albert Camus once wrote, winning your own freedom requires “accept[ing] whatever happens.”4 And doing this leaves one vulnerable—as Westphal acknowledged. Camus advised that we should “fear nothing.” Still, the first time you leave your subordinates free to make $1.8 million decisions for a fledgling company, you may have a knot in your stomach. And as Camus warned, there is no one to help you with it.
FROM ADMIRATION TO EXECUTION
Exasperation with the consequences of the “how” environment has been a key trigger for many liberating leaders. But simply doing the opposite of what you would have done in a “how” company is a fuzzy action plan.5 There are a few leaders—such as Zobrist—who were inspired by the writings of management theorists. Much more common is the case of Bob Koski at Sun Hydraulics, who translated his exasperation with “how” companies into a plan for liberation based on what he had learned about alternative management approaches at companies he admired.
“Starting Sun with three employees (John Allen; my wife, Beverly; and me) and believing that the company would grow to employ several hundred people, I thought we had a golden opportunity to minimize the destructive effects of politics and egos.”6 That’s how Bob Koski described the initial trigger for starting the freedom-based Sun Hydraulics in 1970, now publicly traded and repeatedly ranked among Fortune’s 100 fastest-growing small public companies in America and Forbes’s 200 Best Small Companies. Bob Koski wanted to create a company without those “destructive effects,” a company where employees would feel respected and free to act as they choose. Koski recalled one of the first meetings with his colleagues at his new business: “I said very coyly, ‘I don’t know what to do but I sure know what not to do.’” 7 He thought of his former company’s workplace and labor conflicts, largely caused by the big-ego managers telling people how they have to do their jobs, constantly controlling them, and not listening to them—even after people voted, as mentioned earlier, ten to one to unionize their company. But to launch this project, Koski needed to craft the appropriate plan, because for him, as for other liberating leaders, the freedom he aimed for did not mean anarchy but “a highly orchestrated, disciplined environment that sought to tap into the strengths and intelligence of people.”8
During a year of planning and reading, one organization attracted his attention: the DuPont labs of the 1920s and ‘30s. These labs had no formal organizational charts or titles. They were run by small, self-managed teams of scientists who shared leadership and had the freedom to make decisions, accompanied by the obligation to inform other team members. There was fluid movement of scientists from one project to another. Koski noted how this freedom had led DuPont to world-class performance: “The DuPont Chemical Company prospered. DuPont’s talent pool was highly regarded. DuPont’s position in the chemical world grew rapidly.”9 Without realizing it, Bob Koski was describing exactly the same features that led Bill Gore to wonder why a whole company couldn’t be organized along the same lines.
Inspired by the environment of DuPont labs, Koski designed the environment for his own company and described it, along with his financial and business arguments, in a thirty-four-page handwritten business plan (see its “soft” part on the next page). Only then did he pull the trigger, sending it out to local banks and other potential investors. Surprisingly, the banks didn’t throw out the plan, convinced by its hard