Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [5]
Of course, it’s possible, as George Orwell knew, to change all the words without changing reality. And changing the reality of how people work was Bill Gore’s real ambition.
THE END OF “FUNNY” BUSINESS
Les Lewis, today a manufacturing leader at Gore, was one of the company’s first associates. He recalled what it was like at Gore in 1965. “It was early on, at a funny time for the company,” Lewis explained. “We had [one plant], seventy people, and believe it or not, a dozen ‘supervisors.’ I was one of them, and I decided to write the first supervisor’s handbook—how to deal with back vacations, the sorts of things that a supervisor needs guidelines for.”
What Lewis described as a “funny time” is a phase that almost every successful start-up goes through. The company has started to grow; maybe one day you walk in and realize that you no longer recognize everyone who works there and don’t always know who does what and how anymore. Sooner or later, someone decides that order needs to be restored, or established. An enterprising manager like Lewis decides he’ll share his insights by setting them down on paper, and the first manual is written to tell people how to do their jobs.
If you’re one of those managers, this might seem to be an attractive opportunity—a chance to show your quality and pass on your experience. Some people might even think it fun, a bit like setting down the rules of a whole new society that, from now on, will run like a well-oiled machine.
But Lewis’s “fun” did not last long. Today, a handbook such as the one Lewis wanted would be unthinkable at this company. But how did founder Bill react to the manual in those early days?
Lewis described Bill Gore’s big idea as a product of his experience at DuPont.2 As Gore explained it to Lewis at the time, “When [DuPont] wanted to work on a project, they would assemble a small team, and that small team would work very much as equals … where there was not a hierarchical thing. Everybody worked, everybody brought their skill and knowledge together.” This was, for Gore, an ideal way of working. But at DuPont, “once that project got to a certain point, they would all go back to their organizations, in a much more hierarchical chain of command.” Gore’s notion was simple: If this collaborative, nonhierarchical, liberated structure worked for important projects that needed to get done quickly, why shouldn’t a company work that way all the time? So once Gore left DuPont and started his own company, he decided to do just that. According to Lewis, Bill Gore “vowed that if he ever had a company of his own, he would want it that way because he thought that it really invited a lot of people’s creative skills to come forward.” Even so, it took time and experimentation before Gore settled on an effective way to implement his idea.
The discovery of Lewis’s supervisor handbook, as it happens, was a clarifying moment for Bill Gore. “He wasn’t turned on by it,” Lewis said drily, adding, “But when I wanted to introduce a requisition form for shop work, that was the end of it—Bill hated forms.”
So Bill Gore decided to take his supervisors out to dinner. Soon the monthly dinners became an academy in the values and principles of leadership. “It was almost a Socratic approach to teaching people to lead,” recalled Lewis. “At these dinners, he would talk about how to lead—we wouldn’t call it ‘leading’ then; we were [still] ‘supervisors’—and how to ‘sponsor’—we didn’t call it ‘sponsoring’ then. He would discuss problems that we had and would ask everyone, ‘How would you do that?’ We would hear different ideas about how to deal with situations,” Lewis explained. “It was absolutely a dialogue. He would never drive his answers to us, [saying, ‘This is] what you ought to do.’ Instead, he would ask, ‘How have you solved this problem? Has anyone else experienced one of these?’