Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [83]
RIGHT AWAY
Although Bill Gore’s inspiration for his start-up’s freedom environment came from DuPont’s R&D Skunk Works, he wasn’t looking simply to create great working conditions for researchers and engineers.7 W. L. Gore & Associates was a small industrial company facing the typical challenges of production, sales, recruitment, growth, and profitability. But Gore knew that success would come from self-motivated people taking daily initiatives to meet these challenges—not from supervisors. Management’s role—as he envisaged it—was to act in the service of the rest of the people and to nourish their needs. It wasn’t easy, though. Some Gore supervisors didn’t care about the universal needs of people but rather about drafting policies or skimping on work conditions and equipment. But unlike most companies—including DuPont—Gore did not translate these challenges into a problem such as, “What is the optimal managerial structure to run and coordinate all these business activities?” Instead, he stuck to its creative redefinition: “What kind of leaders should we have to get people to self-motivate to run and coordinate these business activities by themselves?”
Bill Gore knew that “how” managers’ and supervisors’ practices do not make people self-motivated to build a freedom-based environment and do their best, day in and day out. After Gore stumbled upon manager Les Lewis’s “formula for failure” of not caring about people’s needs, he started monthly Socratic dialogue dinners with his supervisors. Once it appeared that supervisors were changing their habits, Gore abandoned both managerial titles and the authority attached to them. Supervisors became nourishing leaders. But that was not enough.
In 1961, as the company’s sales of their only product at the time—Teflon-coated wires and cables—was picking up, Gore looked for ways to expand their sales network. This was not long after the company had moved from Gore’s basement into a small plant up the road, where it still operates. That same year, Burt Chase joined the fifty employees at Gore. Right out of college, he didn’t know what he wanted to do and started as a product inspector checking that the cables’ and wires’ insulation was sound. He hadn’t been at that long when Bill Gore approached him and said, “We’re interested in trying our own salesperson. Would you be interested in going to California?”
“I don’t have any experience in California. I don’t know the customers. I don’t have any sales experience,” Chase started to reply.
“Well, you know, you can learn, you can figure it out. The question is, Are you interested in this kind of an opportunity?” Gore said.
“OK. That sounds really great to me,” said Chase. “When do you want me to go?”
“That’s kind of up to you. Why don’t you figure out when you should go,” replied Gore in his typical, never-telling-what-one-should-do style.
“What else do I need?” Chase continued to probe.
“You’ve got to figure out what else you need and how you’re going to go about this,” was all Gore provided as an answer or, rather, nonanswer.8
And Burt Chase—because he liked sales and was supported by the company’s nourishing environment—indeed went to California “to figure out” his own answers to his own questions.
“That’s a formula for failure,” you may think. Sending out a rookie—in sales and in management, a couple of years out of college, to a big region, remote from headquarters, to “figure out” his answers sounds like an irresponsible decision on the part of Bill Gore. But there’s more. Bill Gore knew that Chase had an interest in sales, but his credentials in the field were something short of stellar. When he’d joined Gore, he’d let it be known that he’d previously applied for a salesman position at several insurance companies—and failed the sales tests.
With all that in mind, “formula for failure” may not do justice to Gore’s assignment for Chase. “Recipe for disaster” might seem more like it. But Gore was not, primarily, concerned with building a managerial sales structure in California, and so he wasn’t seeking an expert manager