Seventeen years ago, the president of a small electronics company looked at the business he had built and realized that it had turned hostile and threatening. In order to change it, he had to invent a new kind of corporation.
Skip Griggs, 50, the president of one of Kollmorgen Corp.'s 16 divisions, once worked for a well-known manufacturer of household appliances. He supervised two assembly lines that produced electric toothbrushes and knives. Each day, the people who worked on this assembly line were given half an hour for lunch and two eight-minute breaks, during which they could eat a candy bar or a sandwich and also go to the bathroom before the assembly-line belts started up again. The company would not allow the workers to use the nearby cafeteria for their breaks, so they took them in the bathroom instead.
"Management figured," Griggs says, "that if you let them use the cafe, they'd eat and hang around and when the belts started up again, then they might rememto go to the bathroom. They couldn't even be trusted to do that by themselves. management just didn't seem to be able to see that this was a little attention that could produce great results. You know little things mean a lot to people, and you can't do anything without people. I just couldn't stomach that. I mean eating in a bathroom, come on. So I opened the cafe on my own and everybody cheered, but I got chewed out like you couldn't believe.
"It was very frustrating. I never met the president of the company, not even once. I had a boss in Chicago. If things were going well, he'd come and visit me. If things were going poorly, I had to visit him. And all the while you're worrying, 'Lord, what did I do now?' You didn't know for sure, you just had to sit there and worry what it might be. It was an atmosphere of suspicion."
In time, Griggs was fired. He came away from the experience not so much embittered as confirmed in the belief that management mistrust of employees was the natural state of the corporate world. He would be a hard man to convince otherwise.
In 1974, Griggs interviewed for a job as manufacturing manager at the Inland Motor Division of Kollmorgen in Radford Va. Corwin Matthews the personnel manager, explained to Griggs that Kollmorgen -- a $79-million-a-year electronics company -- was not like other corporations. There was a new philosophy at work there, Matthews said, which disagreed strongly with the precepts of traditional authoritarian management. People came first at Kollmorgen, he said, and they were seen as basically good, well-intentioned, willing to work, responsible, and creative. Everyone was treated as an equal in an environment grounded on mutual trust and respect. Here people felt secure and could talk openly about their opinions and problems.
Griggs listened politely to this description of what seemed like a mythical kingdom, and took the job, reasoning: "I looked at it as one of two things -- a gold mine or a disaster. Either way I felt I'd know soon enough."
A year passed, and even after Griggs listened to Robert L. Swiggett, Kollmorgen's chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and leading evangelist, describe the company's new corporate vision at a meeting in Hartford, he was still uncertain. Maybe the vision was only that, he thought, fun for a sunny day but quick to evaporate when business got tough. "Maybe then they'd say, 'Let's go back to the old way and tell those dumb bunnies what to do," he recalls thinking. "I thought it was working in our division, but what about the others? You know you go so far, but you sometimes tread lightly. I still had some vague reservations. Let's face it, freedom and respect for the individual are just different."
Four more years passed. Storm clouds came and went and, if anything, the "bunnies" were given more freedom. Meanwhile, Griggs' division also witnessed extraordinary growth. From 1974 to 1979, the company's sales nearly doubled, from $79.1 million to $154.5 million, while earnings almost tripled, from $3.3 million to $9.8 million. Yet Griggs still had some doubts.
Then in 1980, Swiggett published the philosophy in a seven-page brochure that was widely distributed. Griggs was ecstatic. "I knew he had to mean it because he put it in black and white for the world," he says. "He was putting his reputation and all his experience on the line. I said to myself: 'I'm in this for the rest of my life."
The Kollmorgen Corporation Philosophy is philosophy of a very practical sort, as well it should be. After all, Bob Swiggett the philosopher-author is also Bob Swiggett the chairman of the board of a company with 5,000 employees, 16 divisions, and 25 manufacturing locations, not to mention approximately 4,500 shareholders -- a generally skittish crowd favoring results more than contemplation. Thus, Swiggett declared his intentions as early as the front cover of the brochure.
"Freedom and respect for the individual," he wrote, "are the best motivators of man, especially when innovation and growth are the objectives." To avoid misunderstanding, "innovation" was quickly defined as "technological leadership" and "first to market with the best" in the company's three business segments: printed circuitry and associated technology, special direct current motors and controls, and electro-optical instruments. And "growth" was identified as doubling sales and earnings every four years while exceeding a 20% return on shareholders' average equity.
Traditional forms of management cannot sustain these goals, Swiggett went on, particularly in larger companies. In order to achieve innovation and growth, a company must maintain "a free-market environment for every individual in the company," wherein "each employee is exposed to the risk and rewards of the market. . . [and is] primarily responsible for using his abilities and for his own success or failure." The best way to encourage such entrepreneurial commitment is to break a company into small, autonomous "profit center teams.
"Within each small, close-to-its-market business unit," Swiggett wrote, "each person can accurately assess the contributions of the other team members. Each can feel like a partner. Each can feel he contributes, and feel confident that his contribution will be recognized. . . . Each feels responsible. Each individual is every other's judge."
There is a compelling personal conviction throughout this statement that carries with it the incontrovertible certainty of revelation. It is hard to believe, based on the fluid exposition of his cosmology, that Swiggett, like Griggs, came to his faith slowly, awkwardly, and once, even reluctantly. Like any good laboratory scientist, he placed a premium on activity for its own sake, always trying this or that until he or a colleague stumbled across a breakthrough. Then he kept going, content to figure out the theory later.
