No ranks, no titles, nothing but profits. W. L. Gore Associates has an unusual approach to management structure -- none at all.
Early on the morning of July 26, 1976, 23-year-old Jack Dougherty drove the five miles from his apartment to the Newark, Del., headquarters of W.L. Gore & Associates Inc. He noticed the horses grazing on either side of the road, and for a while he held the image in his mind. But he was preoccupied. It was his first day on the job, and the recent MBA from the College of William and Mary was bursting with resolve. "I was beginning my career," he says. "I told myself that all the fooling around had stopped. I was all business."
Dressed in a dark blue suit and smiling broadly, Dougherty presented himself to Bill Gore, the founder of the company. He shook hands firmly but warmly, looked Gore in the eye, and said he was ready for anything. "That's fine, Jack, fine," Gore told him. "Why don't you look around and find something you'd like to do." "That," Dougherty says, "was probably the one thing I wasn't ready for. I was shocked, but he was so relaxed about everything that I decided to go along with it. He said maybe I should start at the Cherry Hill plant, where a lot of the new products were, and I figured they'd probably have something set up for me over there. But they didn't. I was confused for the next three weeks."
Jack spent his time earnestly interrogating various product managers who were more than happy to explain their activities in great detail. Finally, Dougherty careened into the office of Joe Tanner, who was busy marketing the latest wunderkind from the Gore laboratories. It was a white, gossamer-thin membrane with pores too small for a molecule of water to penetrate yet large enough to transmit certain vapors.
It was called Gore-tex, Tanner said, and when it was bonded to a fabric, lo and behold, the fabric became waterproof but "breathable," a combination of qualities that had long eluded researches. He was only making tents with it now, Tanner continued, but it wouldn't be long until the great out-of-doors would see legions of campers wearing Gore-tex parkas, backpacks, and other gear. Dougherty heard them marching. "I liked what I heard," he says. The next morning, the new employee, dressed in jeans, was helping feed fabric into the maw of a huge laminator. Dougherty had found his "something to do." Today, Dougherty is responsible for all advertising and marketing in the fabrics group, the third largest segment of the company's business.
Bill Gore claims that Jack Dougherty's success, like the success of the company itself, is the happy consequence of a system of un-management Gore calls the "lattice organization." It is so named because every individual within it deals directly with every other, one on one, in relationships best described as a cross-hatching of horizontal and vertical lines. Unlike traditional "pyramid" management structures with carefully defined chains of command, Gore's lattice contains no titles, no orders, and no bosses. Associates, as all Gore employees are called, are allowed to identify an area where they feel they will be able to make their best contribution. Then, they are encouraged to maximize their individual accomplishments. "We don't manage people here," Bill Gore says. "People manage themselves. We organize ourselves around voluntary commitments. There is a fundamental difference in philosophy between a commitment and a command."
Hearing about the lattice without seeing it in operation can leave a suspicion that Bill Gore may have created a kind of self-indulgent commune where the profits of commerce are largely irrelevant. But the suspicion doesn't last long; the numbers won't allow it. During the past five years, Gore's sales and earnings have been growing at a compound annual rate of nearly 40%. In the fiscal year ended March 31, 1982, the company's worldwide sales approached $125 million from five basic product groups: wire and cable, medical, Gore-tex fabrics, Gore-tex fibers, and industrial filter bags. The company has some 2,000 associates in 20 plants worldwide and 7 more plants under construction.
"Money is essential," Bill Gore says. "Without it, you don't have an enterprise." When someone suggested recently that Gore's determined drive for profits seemed incompatible with his more rarified ideas about human relationships, Gore said: "That's because there's something wrong with your education, sir. Actually, making money is a creative activity. It means people are applauding you for making a good contribution. In fact, it gives us the freedom to be what we are."
Wilbert L. Gore was born in Meridian, Idaho, near Boise. He is 70 but looks 50. His face is tan and creased from a lifetime of outdoorsmanship, primarily backpacking. He is trim and compact, standing about five feet, seven inches tall. He is calm and totally devoid of pretense. When he was studying for his degree in chemical engineering at the University of Utah, he won the Rocky Mountain Conference diving title from the one-meter board. Bill recalls growing up "with a lot of love around me."
At age six, Bill began his mountain wanderings in the Wasatch Range in Utah. And it was in those mountains, at a church summer camp, that he later met his future wife, Genevieve. Vieve, as she is called, says that in those days, every time she came around, Bill would execute a series of back somersaults. Friends say they are inseparable. One company advertisement features a photograph of them in full backpacking gear against a cratered, mountainous landscape. The caption reads: "The force behind the dream."
