The two years the Gores had given themselves quickly slipped away. They needed business badly. The few odd orders that trickled into the basement just weren't paying the bills. "We came very close to calling it quits," Vieve says. But help was on the way.
One afternoon, Vieve stopped sifting PTFE powder to answer a phone call from a man who said he was with the city of Denver's water department. He said he had a sample of ribbon cable and was very interested but needed answers to a few technical questions. "Obviously Bill was the technical expert," Vieve says, "but he was out on an errand. I didn't know what to say. First, he asked for the product manager and I said he was out at the moment, then he asked for the sales manager, and finally for the president. They were all out, I told him. Before I could ask if I could help, he was hollering: 'What kind of a company is this anyway?"
It took a little diplomacy, but eventually the Gores got an order for about $100,000 worth of ribbon cable to be used as part of a system that monitored pressure in water mains. "That order put us over the hump," Bill says. "We took off from there."
By the time Bob Gore joined the company in 1963 with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, it was clear the wire and cable business had taken hold. The company was properly ensconced in a new plant on Paper Mill Road in Newark, horses grazed lazily in pastures nearby, and the sun was shining on W. L. Gore & Associates. But all was not well. There were profits in the till, but there were also cracks in the lattice.
One warm Monday morning in the summer of 1965, Bill Gore was taking his usual stroll through the plant "to look around and say hello" when he suddenly realized that he no longer knew everyone's name. "I'm not talking about just one person," he says, "but several. I said to myself, 'Hey, the game has changed." Actually, the game was still the same, but there were many more players. The company had grown from simple connubial bliss to close to 200 employees. That growth was, in itself, a basement dream come true, something every entrepreneur hopes for. But, as often happens, it was still somewhat disconcerting.
"As the number of associates grew," Bill says, "we had to find a way to help people get started and then to follow their progress. This was particularly important when it came to compensation." At the same time, Bill wanted to avoid smothering the company in thick layers of formal "management," a common response to organizational problems that he felt stifled individual creativity. Instead, he promoted a kind of "buddy system," a casual Big Brother or Big Sister relationship in which a more experienced associate took a specific and personal interest in the contributions, problems, and goals of a new associate.
Gradually, the "buddy" system maturned into the "sponsor" system, a largely semantic difference that, nonetheless, accurately suggests a more sophisticated sense of advocacy and involvement. Everyone at Gore has a sponsor and frequently more than one. The associate who starts out in, say, fabric inspection and quality control and then becomes interested in fabric lamination will have a sponsor in each department and perhaps still others as the associate's responsibilities grow.
Ultimately this associate will also become a sponsor, because at Gore leaders are not appointed but are allowed to "happen." "Leaders are so defined," Bill Gore says, "because they have followers. And why people follow one person and not another, I don't really know. Sometimes it's based on superior knowledge or skill, but there are many other nonobjective and perhaps even mystical factors."
The sponsorship system was a harmonious addition to Bill Gore's evolving method of un-management. It was flexible, expandable, and well suited to accommodate the future needs of a growing company -- but it wasn't enough. During that tour when Bill discovered that he didn't know everyone's name, he also realized that neither did anyone else. Even more alarming, he found a subtle shift in perspective; the once tightly knit group had lost its sense of identity. Although he wasn't sure of the cause, his memories of the Du Pont task force strongly suggested that it had to do with the number of people in the group. Apparently, he reasoned, as that number approached 200, a group somehow became a crowd in which individuals grew increasingly anonymous and significantly less cooperative.
In part to test his theory and in part to reach midwestern markets, Bill Gore opened a second plant in 1967 in Flag-staff, Ariz. As people shifted to Flagstaff, the number of associates at the Newark plant dropped to 150. "That did the trick," Bill says. "People started smiling more. You could tell they felt better even by the way they said 'hello." In the years that followed, the accuracy of his intuition was proven time and again. Each time the magic number was breached, group cohesiveness and cooperation declined. Each time, Bill would open another plant. In fact, he has opened 18 more plants since 1967, at an average cost of almost $4.5 million. The openings are all the more remarkable because the company never used a dime of debt until 1980.
