Corporate leaders across the country picked up this message. People telling stories about IBM, Tandem, or People Express started using terms like "values," "heroes," and "rituals." Managers made cult heroes of people like Mary Kay Ash, the cosmetics queen who uses diamond bumblebee pins, pink Cadillacs, and motivational stories to inspire housewives to sell millions of dollars worth of cosmetics. Digital Equipment Corp. even hired an anthropologist to help design a team-management system in one of its plants.
Casey Powell has never read Corporate Cultures. (He classifies it as a how-to book, a genre he avoids, believing it is a mistake to overanalyze something one does well intuitively.) When asked, he didn't know what a symbolic manager was. But he and the rest of the people at Sequent are refining the management of corporate culture into a high art. They believe that the environment a company provides for its employees is the key factor in how well they work together to achieve company goals. From the beginning of Sequent's two-plus years of existence, Powell and his three vice-presidents, Scott Gibson, Dave Rodgers, and Larry Wade -- along with Barbara Gaffney, the company's human resources director -- made culture a deliberate priority, and they have nurtured Sequent's values, heroes, and rituals as carefully as a parent nurtures a child.
It makes you wonder where the dedication came from.
On a Tuesday morning in the fall of 1982, Casey Powell flew down from Oregon to the Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters of Intel Corp., one of the world's leading semiconductor companies, where he was then employed. A boyish-looking 37-year-old general manager who had joined Intel seven years earlier as a salesman, Powell was four months into what was perhaps the biggest challenge of his career -- the turnaround of a $100-million microprocessor operation.
The turnaround was crucial to Intel. The microprocessor operation represented 10% of the company's total revenues, and that summer, IBM had announced it was dropping Intel's latest microprocessor product, the 8086, to use a competitive chip in its Displaywriter. Intel management was nervous. The semiconductor industry was in a slump, and for the second year in a row, profit margins were a fraction of what the company liked to consider the norm. Powell had 30 minutes at an executive staff meeting to explain how he intended to proceed.
Powell knew that several of the executives present thought he could do his job better if he moved to California. Although the operational part of the job was based in Oregon, the marketing program, known as Operation Checkmate, was corporate, and the executives had wanted him to lead it from headquarters. Powell had told them that he would not move. He had moved for Intel twice in the past three years; he had been in Oregon only 16 months, and his daughters were just beginning to learn their friends' last names. Although he thought Intel was one of the best-managed companies in the world, and wanted to continue his rise within it, he and his wife liked the more traditional values of the Pacific Northwest and did not want to raise their children in the Bay Area.
Powell is a natural performer, with a salesman's love of telling stories and a stage actor's feel for an audience, and he generally enjoys presentations, even the tough, confrontational kind for which Intel had earned some notoriety. He appreciated Intel's emphasis on achievement and the formal management-by-objective system that allowed ambitious managers like himself to set high goals for themselves, then earn the rewards of reaching them. Although his turnaround was taking longer than expected, Powell was sure that Operation Checkmate would work. His task that day was to convince the rest of management that he was right.
At Intel, such grilling of managers is officially called "constructive confrontation"; privately, it is called "destructive confrontations," "guerrilla warfare," and "table pounding." Although the intensity of the inquisitions is sometimes hard on newcomers and the thin-skinned, most Intel-ites are proud of their willingness to point out weaknesses in one another's thinking, and they enjoy working for an organization that demands high performance. So it didn't surprise Powell when one of the executives interrupted his presentation to ask questions. What was surprising was the direction the questioning soon took.
As the Intel inner circle cringed, a second, very senior executive started asking a series of questions that were, according to one of the men present, "depersonalizing." The tone was that of an officer berating a cadet who hadn't done his homework, and the message was tied in their minds to Powell's unwillingness to move to the Bay Area. They say they will never forget the faces.
Here was Powell -- a loyal, hardworking employee who had done well on the Intel grading system ever since he joined the company -- standing in front of them saying "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" as if he were back in military school. And here was a senior executive lighting into him in a way that the most battle-hardened Intel veterans found too painful to watch. Finally, two of them told the executive that if he wished to continue this line of questioning, he should do it somewhere else. The executive called a break, and everyone left the room. In the hall he apologized, but Powell, according to friends, was so upset that he turned around without saying anything and walked off.
