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organically to meet the company’s real needs as they developed, rather than force the company to work around a structure arbitrarily imposed from on high. Teerlink would later describe the evolving, exploratory character of the concept: “Here’s a way of organizing. Let’s try and see what happens. No, we wouldn’t have a full-blown natural work group concept within weeks or months, or maybe even years. But we’d be aiming toward that.”16 Leadership would be shared, both within the circles and among them, and would, hopefully, emerge where it was needed rather than flow from the center. This experimental, provisional way of proceeding—sometimes called “prototyping”—is typical of the liberating leaders we met. They decide to act not because they think they have all the answers, but because they know they don’t. Only by putting out different ideas and by soliciting help and feedback from others will they discover what’s working and what isn’t.

When we asked Teerlink about the dramatic transition of the top executives to the coaches’ roles, he got up and pointed at a statuette of three interconnected circles on the shelf of his home office.

“See that up there? Released in February 1999 by the Functional Leadership Group at Harley-Davidson? It simply says: ‘Rich Teerlink, Leadership is your legacy.’ I retired in February 1999,” he said. Tears clouded his eyes.

We tried to continue but Teerlink couldn’t; he was so touched by these memories that he had to take a little break. Once back, we asked why this was so emotional for him.

“Because here was the group that was living with this process that we had all constructed together … [One day] Lee Ozley and I were sitting in the room saying basically that operating all this boxes and lines stuff [on organizational charts] is really inhibiting any kind of progress. And then, Lee says, ‘What should a business do? Well, it should create some services and it should help.’ And we put these three circles there. And looking at it we thought, ‘We have to get people working more in concert with one another.’ And damn! Making a Venn diagram and when you look at that, automatically, it says interdependence … it says we as a group are responsible. And let’s get rid of the senior vice presidents.”

Harley-Davidson was a large, heavily unionized industrial company. Launching liberation there, building an environment that treats people as intrinsically equal, required, first of all, treating the unions as equal partners. But not all incumbent companies are heavily unionized. FAVI, for one, wasn’t. This allowed Jean-François Zobrist to build genuine relations directly with frontline people. The next chapter describes how he did it.

7

LIBERATING AN

ESTABLISHED COMPANY

How to Reach Out Directly to Your People

LISTENING TO JEAN-FRANÇOIS Zobrist’s fervor and irreverence puts one in mind of French revolutionaries, perhaps even hussards de la mort. The hussards were a couple of hundred of voluntary cavalrymen who, in the early 1790s, sported the impetuous motto “Vivre libre ou mourir”—“Live free or die.”

Zobrist, as it happens, did have a military—and rebellious—past.1 At seventeen, after reading an article on paratroopers, he decided to enroll for training with a paratrooper unit. The army’s age limit was eighteen, but Zobrist thought he’d be a good jumper and could contribute, so he modified his date of birth by one year on his identity card and got accepted. Later, after having been admitted to the artillery officer candidate school, Zobrist came to know the power of the hierarchy above him when he learned that his transfer was being blocked. “Your rank is a simple paratrooper, you aren’t an officer candidate,” his superior informed him.

So Zobrist did his hussard “ready, fire, aim” thing again. In the village in which he was stationed, during the night, he broke into the town hall to get the Journal Officiel—the French government’s periodic publication of all new laws and decrees, which included the lists of all those admitted to governmental institutions of higher education, including