Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [46]
Cooperation between two people is relatively excellent …. With increase in the number of cooperators, communication becomes more complex, less efficient, and limitations arise in the kinds of possible communications. A precipitous drop in cooperation appears as the group size becomes large enough so that everyone no longer “knows” everyone else. At this point one hears the “we” decided, or did, or believed, etc., become “they” decided, etc. This precipitous drop in cooperation is difficult to forestall in groups larger than about 150 persons. Beyond some such level, it becomes necessary to impose rules, regulations, procedures, and the like that dictate how the cooperation shall be done.15
Other principles of the lattice organization that Gore defined were: “no fixed or assigned authority; sponsors, no bosses; natural leadership defined by followership; person-to-person communication; objectives set by those who must ‘make them happen’; tasks and functions organized through commitments.”16 At the very beginning his company had supervisors, but as Les Lewis recounted, the development of the lattice organization principles triggered Bill Gore’s decision to build a more radically freedom-based environment there.
PILGRIMS AND DOUBTERS
The decision to liberate is neither simple nor obvious—even to those who are aware of and admire the performance of liberated companies. Hundreds of executives have made pilgrimages to Harley-Davidson and France’s FAVI, which hosted them in meeting rooms that employees have now jokingly dubbed the “chapel,” the “cathedral,” and the like. They realize that, from the outside, FAVI is seen as cultlike and Zobrist as a savior of their “lost souls.” So many people visited Harley that it started charging visitors for the time. But whether they’ve paid for the privilege or not, the vast majority of these excellence seekers come back from these visits and don’t change anything in their “how” environments, because they are not armed with freedom values. The visits become merely a “benchmarking” exercise—they admire Harley’s performance but don’t understand its freedom.
Bob Koski, surprised at the widespread faulty reasoning among businessmen, once remarked, “I have to wonder what they teach at business schools.” In fact, among many other things, they teach about his company and its freedom environment. Sun Hydraulics is Harvard Business School’s primary case study on the freedom-based environment. Despite Sun’s story being taught at one of the preeminent business schools in the country, Richard Arter, Sun’s head of investor relations, is not aware of any company that has been modeled on Sun’s “organizational structure—or lack thereof” as a result. In fact, Bob Koski and other executives occasionally appeared in person at Harvard, taking the stage in class to prove to skeptical MBA students that Sun was a real company and not just some hypothetical case.17
The Harvard case study is all about Sun’s values. But making the leap that connects these values with world-class vision is the real intellectual breakthrough that a liberator needs. In fact, only leaders who deeply valued freedom themselves could see during their visits—or through their readings and studies—that world-class performance is the consequence of the company’s freedom, and use this understanding and admiration to trigger freedom building in their