Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [8]
Provide uncomfortable seats
Provide tools that give blisters.
“He listed about eight things. Honestly,” Lewis said. “And then he said, ‘Are you responsible for that wire stripping in the back?’ “I said, ‘Yes sir.’
“He opened the door and walked out.”
Fairness means, above all, that human dignity is not subordinated to bottom-line considerations. Lewis may have thought he was saving money for a struggling start-up with a dwindling bank account. Instead of frugality, Bill Gore saw short-term thinking that would lead to long-term failure.
But there was an even deeper lesson for Lewis in Gore’s “Formula for Failure.” Lewis had a problem—how to save some money on the defective wire. And he imposed a solution on his employees that, he thought, would solve it. He was not the one who had to strip the wire or sit in the dark on old spools, so the obstacles that he had erected to those people doing their jobs did not even occur to him until Gore pointed them out. Lewis never asked whether they had any ideas for how to salvage the wire or what tools or conditions they’d need to get the job done. He never even asked himself whether the problem he was trying to solve was the right one. He never treated his fellow associates as intrinsically equal, as people who are paid to know how to do their jobs as well as he knows his.
If his company was going to be different from traditional companies, Bill Gore could not afford leaders who treated people unfairly. That, too, was a formula for failure.
“ALL IN THE SAME BOAT”
At Gore, associates have commitments instead of jobs. This, again, is more than mere semantics. A job is something a boss gives you, something framed in a box on an organizational chart. A commitment is freely entered into, and is a promise of sorts made to those working alongside you. Commitments are more fluid than jobs. Depending on one’s workload and capacity for new projects, an associate may have one, two, or several commitments simultaneously. An associate may flow in or out of a commitment as the work requires. New hires are not assigned a job but encouraged to seek out commitments where they feel they can best employ their talents, skills, and experience.
In this sense, a commitment is the opposite of a job. It is something chosen, rather than something imposed. It is another sense in which Gore associates are set free from the demands of a traditional hierarchy.
But that’s a recipe for anarchy, not for freedom, you may think. Today a person may like some activity and commit to it. But tomorrow, he may like another activity more and just “recommit” there, leaving his current team with a huge hole to fill. Without some discipline, this freedom of commitment will quickly fall apart. This is where the credibility bucket comes in.
A drop goes in the bucket every time an associate keeps a commitment, from one to finish a memo by tomorrow to seeing through a multiyear project. The credibility bucket also gets a drop added every time an associate helps somebody. Commitments are voluntary—but once a commitment is made, you’d better keep it. If you don’t, your credibility bucket will drain quickly, and with that your ability to work with other associates dries up. Leaving your current commitment without first discussing it with your team, finding a way to reduce your involvement gradually, and avoiding disrupting your colleagues will not only blow a hole in the team’s activities. It will also blow a huge hole in your credibility bucket and, with that, your chances to work in a new team. W. L. Gore & Associates’ culture doesn’t use discipline to avoid anarchy. It relies firmly on self-discipline.
The waterline principle is another way that W. L. Gore & Associates uses self-discipline to keep freedom from becoming anarchy. A “waterline decision”—another local code word—is one that could sink the “boat.” If an associate feels that a decision is important enough that it is make or break—either because it involves a large financial outlay or it could have broad ramifications for the business