Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [7]
The difference at Gore is that the associates there are genuinely consulted—and they are free to choose. This freedom is one of the hallmarks of all of the liberated companies in this book. And by exercising their choice not to follow the Les Lewis who had returned from the outside world, Gore’s associates were actually doing him a favor. They were providing him with valuable information about how he was doing his job that allowed him to change tack and become a more effective leader. The all-too-familiar alternative—each of us grumbles to himself, his family, or his coworkers, but keeps his head down and does enough work to avoid attracting attention—may be one of the invisible but profound reasons your company isn’t performing the way you think it should.
OK, you may say. But how do you get everyone to row in the same direction without a boss at the helm? What guides people’s freely chosen actions and prevents them from pursuing their own interests at the company’s expense? Gore has a way of thinking about these challenges. And unsurprisingly, it’s just a little bit different from the way most companies do. Gore people live the company’s four principles: The first is “freedom.” But along with it are “fairness,” “commitment,” and “the waterline.” The thing to know about these principles is that, unlike the mission and values statements at many companies, associates actually think about and live them. Fairness, commitment, and the waterline make freedom work for Gore.
“FORMULA FOR FAILURE”
Fairness is about being fair to others—both inside and outside the company. According to Lewis, W. L. Gore & Associates wants to treat its suppliers and its customers as equals. But fairness has an internal component as well—it’s about treating your colleagues with dignity and as equals. Lewis, in fact, once needed a little help to understand the fairness principle.
Back in the mid-1960s, when Lewis was a young supervisor, the company was scraping by and still working out the kinks in its production of PTFE-coated cables—its only product at the time. When a batch went bad, Lewis came up with what he thought was an enterprising way to save money by stripping the bad cables so the materials could be reused. “So, I got these three women in the back of the plant and I gave them a wire spool each to sit down on,” Lewis explained. “And I put these spools of cable that had to be stripped there, and I gave them some kind of a knife or something to strip it, and they are sitting back there in the bowels of the Earth like a coffee klatch, stripping this wire off.” Lewis thought to himself: “‘All right. I am set up. Man, we are getting this stripped off and getting it recoated; we are going to save all this.’ Back then we couldn’t afford to throw stuff away.” Needless to say, Lewis was pretty pleased with his economy and enterprise. Bill Gore, however, thought that Lewis needed some help.
Lewis left the women to their work and went back out onto the shop floor, where Bill found him. Lewis continued the story: “‘Do you have a minute?’ Bill Gore said.
“And I said, ‘Sure.’ So we turn around and walk out of the shop and into the only office in the plant, where the only blackboard was in the whole plant, and he shut the door and said, ‘Have a seat.’
“And I sat down, and he wrote up on the board, ‘Formula for Failure,’ and underlined it.”
Underneath, Gore listed a series of bullet points:
Provide