Free to succeed . . .
Whether in troubled economic times or during years of prosperity,
there is a proven way for companies to boost productivity, profits,
and growth. Remarkably, it costs nothing––whether cost is measured
in terms of monetary resources or time– –and is simply based on the
belief that, if only people can be free to act in the best
interests of their company, the results will be tremendous.
Freedom, Inc. presents the evidence that this is not the
Pollyannaish wish of a fe
內容簡介：
Free to succeed . . .
Whether in troubled economic times or during years of prosperity,
there is a proven way for companies to boost productivity, profits,
and growth. Remarkably, it costs nothing––whether cost is measured
in terms of monetary resources or time– –and is simply based on the
belief that, if only people can be free to act in the best
interests of their company, the results will be tremendous.
Freedom, Inc. presents the evidence that this is not the
Pollyannaish wish of a few dreamers, but a reality built by
bottom-line-focused leaders. . . .
The culture of freedom works–and Freedom, Inc. reveals the
secrets of a successful business paradigm based on a trusting,
nonhierarchical, liberated environment.
The visionary leaders profiled here performed near-miracles in
driving their companies to unheard-of levels of success, often from
unlikely or disheartening beginnings. Businesses as diverse as
insurance company USAA, winemaker Sea Smoke Cellars, Gore
Associates, advertising agency The Richardson Group,
Harley-Davidson, and Sun Hydraulics have had the insight and
courage to challenge long-held management beliefs about human
nature and employees–and radically depart from the traditional
command-and-control structures, rules, and policies. By freeing up
the individual initiative and risk-taking instincts of every
employee, these companies showed they could dramatically outperform
their rivals in an array of fiercely competitive
industries.
By listening to employees instead of telling them what to do, by
treating them as equals and not limiting information through a
trickle-down hierarchy, and by encouraging a culture in which
employees have commitments something chosen as opposed to jobs
something imposed, these companies liberated their workers to
fulfill their own individual potential, which has led to more
productive, loyal, and engaged workers, as well as significant
measurable profits and growth.
關於作者：
BRIAN M. CARNEY is a London-based member of the editorial
board of the Wall Street Journal and the editorial page editor of
the Wall Street Journal Europe. In 2009 he won the prestigious
Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary, and in 2003 he won the Bastiat
Prize for Journalism for his writings on business and economic
affairs. After majoring in philosophy at Yale, he earned a master’s
degree in philosophy from Boston University and worked at the
Innovations in American Government program at Harvard University
before joining the Wall Street Journal in 2000.
ISAAC GETZ is a professor at the top-ranked ESCP Europe Business
School and holds Ph.D.s in psychology and management. He has been a
visiting professor at Cornell, Stanford, and the University of
Massachusetts. Dr. Getz conducts and publishes research on
innovation, leadership, and corporate transformation for excellence
and growth and speaks on these topics. His work has been featured
in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and many other
media.
內容試閱：
1
"HOW" COMPANIES AND "WHY" COMPANIES
How Not to Run a Business
Even If You don''t know what Gore-Tex is, you know what it does:
It keeps you dry--guaranteed. As a brand, Gore-Tex has been so
successful that it sometimes seems in danger of disappearing, of
becoming a generic term like "Band-Aid." Since it was invented in
1971, Gore-Tex has given rise to a number of competing products.
Some of those boast properties said to be superior to the original.
But if you walk into a store and want to know whether a ski jacket
is waterproof, the question you''ll probably ask is "Is it
Gore-Tex?"
It''s the kind of brand dominance--over both market share and
"mind share"--that marketers dream of, or lose sleep over. The
story of how it came to be, and came to symbolize an entire market
category, is the story of two radical ideas.
Bill and Genevieve Gore''s first idea was that there were market
opportunities for a chemical called polytetrafluorethylene--PTFE
for short--that DuPont wasn''t pursuing.
Today, PTFE is best known as Teflon, that magical polymer that
keeps our pans from sticking and our pipes from leaking, among a
myriad of other far-flung uses. It is supposedly so slippery that
it is the only known substance to which a gecko''s feet will not
stick. But in 1938, it was an experiment gone wrong for Roy
Plunkett, who worked at DuPont. Plunkett was trying to develop a
refrigerant for car air conditioners when one of his canisters of
gas seized up solid. He cut it open and found that the
tetrafluorethylene inside had "polymerized"--that is, turned to a
kind of plastic, white and slippery. Three years later, DuPont
received a patent on the stuff, but then contented itself with
selling it as a raw material to those who wanted to incorporate it
into their products. It would be another thirteen years before a
Frenchman, Marc Gregoire, stuck it to a pan so that nothing else
would.
Bill Gore had other plans for PTFE. He thought it would make a
great insulator for electrical cables. But DuPont was a chemical
materials company, not an electrical products company, and wasn''t
interested. So, at the age of forty-six, this father of four quit
DuPont, licensed PTFE, and set up shop in his basement with seed
money from friends in the Gores'' bridge club.1
As it turned out, Bill Gore was right about PTFE''s potential. But
it was his and Vieve''s second idea that gave the world Gore-Tex,
along with more than one thousand other innovative products, and
made W. L. Gore Associates into a multibillion-dollar leader
in markets spanning from aerospace and electronics to energy and
health care. Like PTFE, that second idea was borrowed, in a way,
from DuPont. But like the remarkable polymer, Bill''s insight had to
do with what the company he had worked at for years wasn''t
doing.
Bill Gore believed that the way we talk about one another and
about our jobs affects the way we think and the way we act. So he
replaced his employees with "associates," their jobs with
"commitments," and their managers with "leaders."
Of course, it''s possible, as George Orwell knew, to change all
the words without changing reality. And changing the reality of how
people work was Bill Gore''s real ambition.
THE END OF "FUNNY" BUSINESS
Les Lewis, today a manufacturing leader at Gore, was one of the
company''s first associates. He recalled what it was like at Gore in
1965. "It was early on, at a funny time for the company," Lewis
explained. "We had [one plant], seventy people, and believe it or
not, a dozen ''supervisors.'' I was one of them, and I decided to
write the first supervisor''s handbook--how to deal with back
vacations, the sorts of things that a supervisor needs guidelines
for."
What Lewis described as a "funny time" is a phase that almost
every successful start-up goes through. The company has started to
grow; maybe one day you walk in and realize that you no longer
recognize everyone who works there and don''t always know who does
what and how anymore. Sooner or later, someone decides that order
needs to be restored, or established. An enterprising manager like
Lewis decides he''ll share his insights by setting them down on
paper, and the first manual is written to tell people how to do
their jobs.
If you''re one of those managers, this might seem to be an
attractive opportunity--a chance to show your quality and pass on
your experience. Some people might even think it fun, a bit like
setting down the rules of a whole new society that, from now on,
will run like a well-oiled machine.
But Lewis''s "fun" did not last long. Today, a handbook such as
the one Lewis wanted would be unthinkable at this company. But how
did founder Bill react to the manual in those early days?
Lewis described Bill Gore''s big idea as a product of his
experience at DuPont.2 As Gore explained it to Lewis at the time,
"When [DuPont] wanted to work on a project, they would assemble a
small team, and that small team would work very much as equals . .
. where there was not a hierarchical thing. Everybody worked,
everybody brought their skill and knowledge together." This was,
for Gore, an ideal way of working. But at DuPont, "once that
project got to a certain point, they would all go back to their
organizations, in a much more hierarchical chain of command."
Gore''s notion was simple: If this collaborative, nonhierarchical,
liberated structure worked for important projects that needed to
get done quickly, why shouldn''t a company work that way all the
time? So once Gore left DuPont and started his own company, he
decided to do just that. According to Lewis, Bill Gore "vowed that
if he ever had a company of his own, he would want it that way
because he thought that it really invited a lot of people''s
creative skills to come forward." Even so, it took time and
experimentation before Gore settled on an effective way to
implement his idea.
The discovery of Lewis''s supervisor handbook, as it happens, was
a clarifying moment for Bill Gore. "He wasn''t turned on by it,"
Lewis said drily, adding, "But when I wanted to introduce a
requisition form for shop work, that was the end of it--Bill hated
forms."
So Bill Gore decided to take his supervisors out to dinner. Soon
the monthly dinners became an academy in the values and principles
of leadership. "It was almost a Socratic approach to teaching
people to lead," recalled Lewis. "At these dinners, he would talk
about how to lead--we wouldn''t call it ''leading'' then; we were
[still] ''supervisors''--and how to ''sponsor''--we didn''t call it
''sponsoring'' then. He would discuss problems that we had and would
ask everyone, ''How would you do that?'' We would hear different
ideas about how to deal with situations," Lewis explained. "It was
absolutely a dialogue. He would never drive his answers to us,
[saying, ''This is] what you ought to do.'' Instead, he would ask,
''How have you solved this problem? Has anyone else experienced one
of these?'' Meanwhile, he was also instilling in us values and value
judgments."
So the "funny time" ended. No supervisors ever attempted to write
rules and policies again, because there were no more supervisors at
Gore. And the leaders, who took the place of the supervisors, were
busy helping people--instead of telling them how they had to work.
But it would take more experimentation and time before Bill Gore
fully implemented his second big idea of a radically different way
to work.
THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD
Fast-forward to the mid-1980s. Thirteen years ago, Lewis had left
the company for greener pastures. After spending this period in
more traditional command-and-control companies, he''s now decided to
return to his native Newark, Delaware, and give W. L. Gore
Associates the benefit of knowledge and experience he''s gained
about managing big companies. Gore itself had gotten a lot bigger
over the years, with several manufacturing sites in the United
States and abroad and several thousand associates. The
circumstances looked perfect. The plant had just been moved to a
brand-new facility and Lewis, a newly minted manufacturing leader
had a big corner office, making him feel important: "I was feeling
very confident--''I have arrived,'' you know?" There was a lot on his
plate. Operations were inefficient and the manufacturing techniques
people used appalled Lewis: "Instead of computers they were using a
columnar pad with numbers they were ticking off to run
manufacturing operations by hand."
So Lewis decided to change all that, to instill some discipline,
show people that they were working in a backward way, and push them
to use a newfangled tool called a computer spreadsheet.
It looked like the right thing to do. Though quite big already,
the company lagged behind its main competitors in the use of
modern, computer-based operations management. Lewis''s proposed
course of action was unimpeachable and would have been accepted in
any other company. What Lewis couldn''t see is how different Gore
had become since he''d left.
His efforts lasted six months and the only result was
personal--he was ready to leave the company again. And it wasn''t
because of then-president Bob Gore''s--Bill''s son--hatred of
computers "Bill hated forms, Bob hated computers," Lewis
explained but because no associate would ever listen to him, never
mind follow him. "I was using the techniques that I had been
practicing for thirteen years elsewhere. More power, more
influence, more whatever, and suddenly it dawned on me--an
epiphany: ''You know what the Gore organization is like. You were in
it. Why are you trying this top-down kind of a way?''"
And so Lewis rediscovered the values and principles of leadership
Bill Gore had taught him and others at their Socratic dinner
meetings. Lewis dubbed it the "yellow brick road."
"You ask your associates ''Where do you want to go?''" Lewis told
us. "And they say, ''To the Emerald City.'' So you don''t tell them,
''Follow the yellow brick road,'' the road your own knowledge
dictates is the right one," Lewis explained. "You don''t, because
all they will say is, ''You''re crazy. We''re going off through the
woods....
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