Like a lot of managers at smaller traditional family-owned-and-operated companies, the upper echelon of Findley Adhesives never had sat down and actually talked about their values. They lived what some jokingly referred to as "The Findley Way" as habitually as they put on their ties in the morning, but they had never been struck by the need to write down what they considered to be self-evident truths. After talking about it at a management meeting last March, the younger generation thought it was important to reestablish or at least reiterate the company's core values, and the older generation agreed to go along.
John Findley and Mark Ward, the son of the executive vice-president, made the rounds of the president and a number of Findley's top managers in the weeks before the meeting and asked what they thought Findley's core values were. The two men then wrote a statement, which they presented to the meeting. It read: "Findley Adhesives Inc. is successful because we: compete on perceived value, not on price; provide uneualed service and product quality; build strong relationships with our customers; listen to their needs; and respond quickly. We are innovative and unique, therefore being different from our competitors. Above all, we are successful because of our people. We take pride in being an organization where -- 'You make the difference."
"I wanted the guy in the shipping department, debating about whether or not to send out a Findley product in a ratty box, to have a basis for making that decision," John Findley says.
"We wanted a statement that would make sense to everybody from the chairman of the board to the guy who sweeps out the dock at night," adds Mark Ward. "We must have done 20 drafts."
And the group agreed that the paragraph "captured the essence" of Findley's core values. "We were well aware of those values before John was around," says Russ Anderson, a sales manager who has been with Findley for 22 years. "We believed in them.We had lived them. But we thought there were probably some new people who were not conscious that Findley had those values. Some of the older people who reinforced them by living them were no longer around."
The statement was published in "Findley in Focus," the company newsletter, and the managers agreed to talk about it with the people they worked with. What they found didn't surprise the old guard -- most people knew, without being told, what Findley's values were. Still, John Findley thinks the exercise was important.
"I can remember when Findley Adhesives was a $5-million company," he says. "It was run by 5 people, and they used to meet every morning at 8:30. Now the company is run by 35 people, and some of them are spread all over the world. We need to devise a more formalized system of communication, but at the same time keep it simple, to monitor things, but give autonomy to the individual managers. Most people here like working for a family business. We want to keep it that way. The need for education and communication is strong than ever."
Excellence is a good book, Findley says, and the timing was great, at least for Finding Adhesives. But its true importance is as a provider of a common language and a framework for discussion. This seems especially true after decades of managerial preoccupation with sophisticated financial formulas, efficiencies of scale, and institutionalized product-development processes. Excellence has helped companies talk about issues, attributes, and values that they intuitively know are important.
Ed Gaffney was having lunch with Dean Treptow, president of Milwaukee's Brown Deer Bank and, as must have happened countless times over the past two years in countless other places and among countless other people, the conversation turned to In Search of Excellence and, in this instance, to the seminars at Ortho-Kinetics. Treptow, like John Findley before him, started a discussion series at the bank for employees who wished to attend. Eighteen to 20 of its 50 employees usually showed up at 7:30 Thursday mornings.
They, too, went through the book chapter by chapter, with discussions led by anyone who showed "even the faintest sign of interest" in the subject. "It's important to have regular and ongoing opportunities for everyone in this organization to participate in the decision-making process," says Richard Laabs, the bank's senior vice-president. "There are no civil wars here, but it isn't always easy to get a forum for groups to get together."
The book also reminded managers at Brown Deer Bank of the importance of task forces. Shortly after a couple of the bank's managers had finished reading the book, they decided to put together a task force to evaluate the bank's fringe-benefit policy. And the policy adopted at the task force's suggestion was "far different than what the policy committee [composed of the bank's five senior officers] in its infinite wisdom would have come up with," says Laabs. Other than increased awareness of the need for communication and a reminder of the usefulness of task forces, Laabs isn't sure what Brown Deer's people came away with from the meetings. "But if you could remember the eight principles, you'd be doing well," he says. "That's the kind of stuff football players put inside their helmets. Businesspeople could sew it inside their lapels."
In their examination of successful American businesses, Peters and Waterman found and articulated a national corporate mythology, fragments of which had been stretching the fabric of a more control-oriented managerial thinking for years. They spoke up for a widespread longing to return to old-fashioned American business values. They defined a new emphasis on people, on motivating employees, on informal communications.They placed them in a conceptual framework, provided a history, a vocabulary, and the stamp of legitimacy documented by the stories about successful companies. In a world that sometimes threatened to let itself be governed by a fascination with the tools of an increasingly technology-oriented age, they chose to reemphasize a gut-level understanding of business and life, an understanding that people from many segments of the business world already shared. And American business responded.
"Something has to act as a catalyst," says Ed Gaffney. "Somebody has to set the goals. People need direction. This book helped us to communicate goals, to get more people to believe. It became a focal point." So he and his counterparts throughout the country bought the book, to help pass the word both within their companies and among their business associates. And that mission, probably more than any other, sums up the business and publishing phenomenon of a book called In Search of Excellence. It has set in motion an energetic self-examination among managers about how to get their companies moving and how to keep their employees enthusiastic about their work and progress -- activities that were, in fact, about to take off. They just needed a slight push to get started.
