Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [97]
And with that education—and mindful of his own ignorance—McDermott turned them loose on their own firm. People would “come up with ideas to do it better, to serve better and cheaper,” he said. Here, too, education helped. If an employee identified a need within USAA, McDermott would train them to fill that need, instead of hiring an outside expert who might know everything about computers but nothing about USAA. He summed it up this way: “We enriched the jobs…and we enriched the people that do the jobs by giving them more information and education.”
Underlying it all was the Golden Rule, which McDermott referred to repeatedly when we met him, and which became a powerful competitive advantage for USAA that persists to this day. “Serve others as you’d like to be served. Service is what we’re all about. If we serve people they’ll come back to us.” And they have, and still do, which is why USAA not only dominates its market segment almost totally—97 percent of servicemen and -women are members—but why its customer satisfaction ratings are sky-high.
McDermott spoke about “service” in religious terms, and that is how he thought of it personally. When we asked him to explain his approach to running USAA, he thought all the way back to his childhood in Readville, a tiny hamlet in what was then rural Massachusetts. Today, Readville has been absorbed into the greater Boston metropolitan sprawl. But back then, it was “a little crossroads, with maybe two or three hundred people,” he said. It was near there, in Canton, that a young Bobby McDermott would first watch planes take off and land and decide he wanted to become a pilot. And it was in the hamlet of Readville that McDermott was taught the lessons that would guide his governance of USAA half a century later. “Like Robert Fulghum, who says, ‘All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten,’ I say, ‘All I need to know I learned in Sunday school,’” McDermott explained. Even so, he was careful to say, “I’m not trying to preach to the world.” While it has a religious dimension for him, the message is a worldly one, whether you are of a different faith or no faith. And that message is similar to Gore’s principle of “fairness” and Sun Hydraulics’ “courtesy”: Treating people as the unique, equally valuable human beings that they are, whether they are subordinates, colleagues, customers, or suppliers, is good for business. McDermott’s Golden Rule is his own personal gloss on the same principle.
It should come as no surprise that this basic concept comes up again and again at these liberated companies. Each of the leaders we met and studied came back to the notion that he was just one man, and that excellence could be achieved only by fully utilizing the knowledge and capabilities of everyone in the organization.
But if you are Robert McDermott and you are coming into an organization of thousands of people, many of whom have been treated with suspicion—recall the measurement of pencils—and sometimes contempt for years, the challenge lies in getting those people to believe you when you say you think of them as equals and expect them to act that way. The leaders at Harley, GSI, FAVI, and USAA each took a different approach, one that was tailored to the particular organization he was liberating and its history and challenges. Rich Teerlink involved Harley’s unions in corporate decision making in a way that they had never experienced, while taking down the barriers that separated management from the blue-collar workforce. Jean-François Zobrist first tried unthreatening methods with controlling managers but in the end stripped them of their authority, though he maintained their salaries and let them find other useful, or at least nondamaging, roles in the company.
McDermott set his people free to do their jobs, but he recognized that in a large, bureaucratic organization, there were likely to be a lot of people who didn’t want to be in their jobs at all but were unable to leave. Zobrist had something of the same problem, although on a smaller scale. In McDermott