Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [57]
By the last week of August 1983, Zobrist’s stomach was in knots—he still did not know how he was going to confront the challenges facing FAVI, which by now had totally exasperated him. Then, while mowing his lawn one day near the end of the month, he had an epiphany.
OF LAWN MOWERS AND PROSTITUTES
The mower was misfiring. Zobrist, a tinkerer who does his own mechanical work on the ultralight airplanes he likes to fly, took apart the mower, cleaned the spark plug, and got it running again. As he returned to mowing the lawn, he mused over what he would have needed to do to make a similar repair at FAVI, taking into account the rules, procedures, and regulations the company imposed. The imaginary operation looked like this in his mind:
The worker, having no right to touch the broken equipment, calls the machine setter, who, after tinkering a bit, says that it’s not a setting issue but a maintenance problem. He then goes to see the workshop head, who in turn calls the department head, who in turn calls the maintenance service. The maintenance head sends in the mechanic, who starts by cleaning up the carburetor. Finding no improvement, he calls in the electrician, who finally finds the bad spark plug. The electrician, like Alfred with his gloves, goes off to the supply closet to exchange the old plug for a new one. He comes back, puts in the new plug, and calls the setter. The setter starts the machine and calls in the controller, who verifies that the mower does in fact now work. He then informs the workshop head that the mower has been repaired. Finally, the shop head goes to find the worker—who has been assigned to another mower in the meantime—to instruct him to return to work on his original mower.
“Once I comprehended this sequence of events,” recounted Zobrist, “anxiety, and then panic, overwhelmed me. My heart was racing. I stopped mowing, sat on the lawn, and lit a cigarette, saying to myself that I will never succeed. I will never find a way to give the worker the freedom to fix his equipment by himself, to have his own tools, and have a spare spark plug handy in advance. And if I even was to succeed, what would I do with all the setters, controllers, workshop heads, and department heads?!”
But his common sense forbade Zobrist from giving up: “What is right in the garden should also be right in the plant.”
This common sense suddenly led him to his breakthrough conclusions of what to do in FAVI:
For the company to be nimble, the decisions have to be made by the workers, in real time, on the ground.
A good worker is one who takes initiatives.
At home, all workers take initiatives.
The current production structure had no justification other than blocking initiative.
It is necessary, therefore, to dismantle this structure—or at least to orient it to other missions.
This exasperation with the “how” structure triggered his liberation campaign. So the morning of the first day back to work in September, Zobrist gathered his managers and said:
First, I’ll never leave! We’ll either hit the wall together or we’ll evolve together … Second, I’ll offer you my resignation every five years, because I know that power makes one crazy—especially given the latitude our owner gives his CEOs—and I want to give you an opportunity to save the company if this happens to me. In addition, my strengths and