Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [55]
“Was it you?” he asked Zobrist.
“Yes, it was. For fifteen days you took me for a fool. So I wanted to prove to you that I’m not,” replied Zobrist.
We don’t know whether the colonel thought Zobrist was wise. But Zobrist did get his transfer (he would eventually achieve the rank of second lieutenant in the ballistic missiles unit). Zobrist told us this story to try to explain what he called his flaw of acting first and thinking later. The subject came up after he told us how, at the age of twenty-two, he met the owner of the company he had gone to work for after leaving the army. The proprietor was a forceful but open-minded personality, and from time to time he would tour his property, asking, “How’s everything, fine?” Most of the time, he received—and in truth expected—only formulaic replies. When it was Zobrist’s turn, he replied frankly, “Not at all, sir!” And then he explained all the ridiculous and badly functioning things that he saw happening in the company. The owner listened to the maverick and took steps to address the issues Zobrist identified. Sixteen years later, on April 15, 1983, this owner—as we described in chapter 1—flew him by helicopter over the FAVI plant and announced, to everyone’s surprise, that Zobrist would be the new CEO. Zobrist accepted the offer, although what he saw at FAVI was not to his liking. But this time, he decided not to act first and think later.
Instead, for the first four months he was at the plant, Zobrist behaved, as he put it, as a kind of “tourist.” He used this interim period to observe and listen to what was going on in the company. Zobrist asked the incumbent CEO, who had to leave in July, not to change anything during this transition. As a tourist he spent a lot of time on the shop floor talking with and listening to people about their families, where they lived, their hobbies—actions he assumed would not threaten local “how” managers. That assumption was only partly correct. Each time he walked into a manager’s area, Zobrist’s every step was shadowed until he reached the “frontier,” where another manager was already waiting to receive the “baton.” This provoked Zobrist to action; he saw in the surveillance a kind of primordial instinct to guard one’s turf. And this, he felt, was incompatible not only with his own freedom, but that of everyone else at the company. Those managers viewed Zobrist as a visitor, and moreover as one whose intentions they did not trust. He called a meeting of the managers and said, “I understood well that every one of you made a pee-pee around his station. But what you haven’t seen is that, from the first day, when I stepped down from the helicopter, I made a pee-pee around the whole plant. So, I’m at home all over this place.”2 It was Zobrist’s first warning to the managers that their turf was no longer secure.
The incumbent CEO made him meet all the company’s external stakeholders—from the mayor to the local heads of social security and administration—and Zobrist saw that everyone held his predecessor in high esteem. Zobrist also respected him highly. As a man of strong ethical principles, he never allowed himself to influence Zobrist’s opinion of FAVI’s people or practices in any way. At first glance, FAVI looked to Zobrist like a well-managed company according to the norms dominant in the 1970s. The CEO’s office had a window overlooking the whole shop floor from above, and there were time clocks and penalties that would dock people’s pay when they were more than five minutes late, which escalated for repeat offenders. There were two locked supply closets, a drink dispenser—free only in the summer—and adjustable wrenches to save money on maintenance tools. Then there was the bureaucracy. Every morning the CEO, in the presence of