Books That Transform Companies

Profile of a company that promotes teamwork and open communications by sharing books.

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Why the crew at Web Converting -- from top managers to shift workers -- is meeting for an hour every week just to read

James Wilborn, a machine operator, was shifting in his chair, looking a little uncomfortable under the conference room lights and the scrutiny of his 13 blue-denimed coworkers. All he'd done was comment on a passage in this book they were reading -- saying how maybe it was better to be part of a team of outstanding individuals than part of an outstanding team. Just something he thought. You could argue it either way.

Which is what the men surrounding him did. I don't think so, said the guy on top of the filing cabinet; people lose too much peripheral vision if they're not focused on becoming an outstanding group. What about Michael Jordan? said someone else. Great basketball player, but no team championship [as this goes to press]. Said yet another guy, drumming on his knee with a yellow highlighter pen: outstanding groups have to have outstanding individuals, don't they? Listeners nodded. There were more comments, then a brief lull, and then Wilborn was off the hook. It was the next person's turn to talk about a passage that interested him.

It was your typical Thursday afternoon at Web Converting Inc., in the Dallas suburb of Cedar Hill, Tex., though by most companies' standards it wasn't very typical at all -- at first glance, it seemed downright weird. Every Thursday at 4 p.m. the shouts start echoing through the 40,000-square-foot plant: "C'mon, boys, time to read!" Machine operators and production workers step away from their jobs to convene in the plant's narrow windowless meeting room and read a book, aloud, on company time.

And on that day the book being read was Leadership Is an Art, a collection of musings on leadership and teamwork by Max De Pree, chairman of employee-owned and oft-commended furniture manufacturer Herman Miller Inc. Weird. And not just to an outsider. It was weird to the Web crew, too -- at first. "Different," says 19-year-old machine operator Steve Bailey diplomatically. "I thought he was crazy," recalls a blunter Mark Cox, a 31-year-old maintenance worker, of the moment when the plant's production manager said he'd like all the workers to read a book together and share their thoughts about it.

But that was last year, and since then the line workers have overcome the initial anxiety about reading for an audience. They now seem to welcome the break of sitting elbow to elbow, working through a chapter a week, talking about the ideas De Pree raises -- how everyone has the right and duty to influence decision making; what meaningful work and controlling your destiny mean; whether you'd rather be in a group of outstanding individuals or part of an outstanding group.

"Once we go in there and do it, a lot of good ideas come out," says Bailey. "A lot of it is just the process of getting the thoughts going." Says Cox: "It helped my relationships, sitting around talking about things. We have to get along at this place; if we get a last-minute order, we can't have people lagging behind. We all have to get to it. And that happens here -- the atmosphere is different." Different, indeed. And made so, its beneficiaries argue, largely by the simple act of reading a book.

Consider the traditional ways that most companies use books. There are textbooks for training, and manuals for establishing rules. The CEO might read a book on quality or leadership or marketing every now and then -- or even regularly and methodically -- in an attempt to cull ideas that will help locate a customer or unite a management team. At most companies, when the books have been read they're set on a shelf, where, almost always, they stay.

Other companies do more. At these the books may be sporadically shared, informally or formally, among executives -- who may explore the ideas together.

But then there are companies -- Web Industries Inc., a $20-million contract manufacturer with 210 employees at six sites, is one -- that have found a way to put books to still more powerful and radical use. From the business fable Zapp! (set in the Normal Company of Normalburg, USA) to De Pree's more philosophical Leadership, books at Web have provided a floor for companywide debate about everything from internal relationships to what makes for better customer service. Forget the image of the isolated president holed up in his inner sanctum, reading to increase his individual competence -- at Web, books are bought in bulk, passed hand to hand, photocopied, put on meeting agendas, and read out loud. At Web Converting, the Cedar Hill unit, the books are read by the entire production crew.

There are two reasons, says Robert Fulton, Web's founder and president, "that books play maybe the major role in the change-of-thinking process going on here." The first is predictable: books have helped get lots of people thinking about the same concern at the same time. By introducing a book on a carefully chosen subject, Fulton can concentrate his company's attention on areas of trouble or opportunity -- teamwork, say, or customer service. (Want to do the same? See "The Smart CEO's Reading List" [July 1991, [Article link]] -- consensus recommendations of the best business books, both classic and new, organized by category of interest. They picks are drawn from interviews with some 50 well-read leaders of fast-growing companies.)

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