Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [58]
This last remark was deliberately disarming. Although his training in Paris and readings had not provided him with a road map for dismantling the existing managerial structure, he became aware of the threat such a process would pose to many managers. Familiar with the work of management theorist Douglas McGregor, Zobrist adopted his advice on how to transform managerial structures: “It is necessary, of course, to build as many safeguards into the process as possible so that individuals can reject ideas and implications that are threatening (i.e., to keep the freedom of genuine choice in the open).”4 Zobrist’s safeguards indeed reassured a quarter of the managers, mostly from production, though they disappointed another group that wanted changes. The rest of the managers seemed to remain neutral. At the same time, Zobrist proceeded with some changes calculated to be unthreatening to “how” managers—but meaningful for the rest of the people.
This time, he was inspired by Jean-Christian Fauvet and, through him, by the Chinese Taoist military strategist Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu advised military leaders, over two thousand years ago, to avoid confronting the enemy and instead go around it or under it, as a stream would do with a rock, with the goal of occupying more and more of the terrain. He gave the former CEO’s big office to the accounting department and had its big window overlooking—that is, constantly monitoring—the shop floor walled up. He then made the temporary office he had been using during the transition into his permanent one. The door to his new office, which was opposite the men’s bathroom, was always open, which gave him the opportunity to have a quick exchange with almost any male employee at some point during the day. He also eliminated the daily ritual of opening all the company’s mail—an intrusion into everyone’s privacy under the pretext that the mail is professional—and the weekly “planning”—that is, score-settling and finger-pointing—meetings.
In addition to these little “nothings,” there were some “little things” that he did change, being careful to leave the managers’ prerogatives in place. He noticed that an order that would take one day to fill spent several weeks languishing in the office of the sales assistant, so Zobrist had orders routed to the production department first, and only then sent to sales to be recorded. At that time, pricing decisions were in the hands of an accountant, who could take two weeks to get a price to the salesman, so he gave the salesman authority to set prices himself.
One other little thing he did concerned a manager who stomped around the shop floor with a sour look on his face, terrorizing his subordinates and blowing up at least once every day. So one day in front of a crowd, Zobrist gave the sourpuss a dressing down of his own. “Are you cuckolded?” Zobrist asked. “Or ill? Is your child ill? No? So, what is wrong? Nothing? Then stop being huffy. It’s cowardice.” Zobrist knew even then what the studies cited in chapter 2 have shown: that being badly treated by one’s superiors is a key cause of stress—and hence, underperformance—for subordinates. He also knew that the opposite—treating people as intrinsically equal—was needed in the company.
In recalling this story, Zobrist simply remarked that no employee can do a good job if his manager is always glowering. “Being in a good mood” would later become one of the company’s four values.
After this confrontation, Zobrist went back to Sun Tzu’s strategy of occupying the terrain by small, unthreatening steps. Now on his list was trying to get people to do what they wanted to do, instead of simply what they were assigned to do. So he’d move around the company of several hundred people asking them questions such as, “How long have you worked at this job? Aren