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By Root 6704 0

As an example of this, McChrystal described special operations commanders in Iraq who adapted their units, turning them from just “shooters”—the people who go out on missions and kill or capture the enemy—into intelligence analysts who are always looking for targets and thinking about targets when they are not in the field. “In the past, when they were not going on the target, the shooters would just have been working out or sleeping,” McChrystal said. Instead, the commanders put them behind desks to analyze and sift through and argue over all the raw intelligence about potential targets. “As a consequence, [those commanders] probably increased their field capacity tenfold. They created guys who were entrepreneurial and always fighting for more information. They owned the mission much more—because they were actually assembling and analyzing the information and selecting priorities … They were careful not to waste intelligence assets, because it affected their productivity, [and] they did not send the assault force on a stupid mission, because they were the assault force that was going on that mission. When we captured people, they would sit in on the interrogations. It made them so much more effective.”

Blue-Collar American

DuPont makes a lot of things. To survive for 208 years a company has to be good at making a lot of things. In fact, DuPont makes so many things that if you go to its website and click on “Products & Services,” it shows you the alphabet. If you click on any letter—except J, Q, or X—there is something DuPont makes that starts with that letter. Hit “H” and you get directed to “Harmony® Extra XP herbicide.” Hit “Z” and you get directed to “Zenite® LCP liquid crystal polymer resin.” Given how many products DuPont makes, and the number of blue-collar workers it employs all over the world, there are few executives who can better describe the kind of blue-collar workers needed for the twenty-first century than Ellen Kullman, who became DuPont’s nineteenth CEO in 2009.

In an interview at company headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, Kullman summarized in a single word what she looks for in every employee today, from senior vice presidents to production line employees: “presence.” “We want every employee to be present in the room. What I mean by that is that all the rote jobs today are gone—they are done by machines. Now you have to have people who can think and interact and collaborate. But to do that they have to be engaged and paying attention—they have to be present—so that they are additive, and not just taking up space. Whatever job you have in the company, you need to understand how your job adds value wherever you are [in the chain]. Because if you know that, then you can add value. But you will not be successful here if you just come to work and say, ‘When do I arrive and when do I get to leave?’”

Production-line workers at today’s DuPont plants, she added, have to “collaborate and work in teams, they have to be able to communicate with engineers and tell them everything that they are seeing on the line every day. They have to bring their thinking into what they do—they can’t just go into their little zone and punch buttons all day. It is just a much more integrative and collaborative environment.”

A line worker who is engaged can save a company millions of dollars with just one insight, as Kullman explained with an example. DuPont invests a huge amount of money every year in factories and equipment, and one key to making profits is having those machines working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. “So we are constantly measuring uptime and yields on every piece of equipment,” said Kullman. The company has a big plant in Spruance, Virginia, and on a particular production line of spinning cells that put out Kevlar fibers the machines kept prematurely failing, bringing the whole line down. “So the engineers are sitting there trying to solve the problem in one area of the line,” Kullman recalled, “and one of the line operators broke in and said to them, ‘You know what is strange is that