No one will ever accuse Don Oberg of being soft. His employees work 50 hours a week and get all of 15 minutes for lunch. Yet last year, some 1,600 job applicants were clamoring to sign up. When it comes to building an industry leader, here's a man with a style all his own.
Word has it that the company president will fire you if he finds fingerprints on your machinery. Once, the story goes, he saw a stray match on his spotless shop floor and, like Sherlock Holmes, relentlessly followed every clue until he found the matchbook it had come from. He will follow wet footprints, too, and confront the employee who forgets to wipe his feet at the door. Pennsylvania's Allegheny-Kiski Valley is dotted with tool-and-die shops started by employees who just plain got fed up with the "prison camp" atmosphere and who left to start their own companies. In the midst of union country, it is the largest nonunion company in Western Pennsylvania.
Still, every year applicants show up by the hundreds, hoping for a chance to work at Oberg Industries Inc. Last year, 1,600 applied, 30 were hired. And those 30 had a taste of what was to come not only by the rumors, but by the very selection process.
"We had to draw circles with both hands," recalls Keith Schultz. "And you had two circles, one inside the other, and you had to draw a line in between them without touching both lines -- at seven o'clock in the morning!" Schultz is describing the beginning of a long, stressful day of psychological testing at Oberg's Freeport, Pa., headquarters, a day patterned after Oberg's own workday: Start at seven a.m., quit at five, 15 minutes for lunch. No chitchat. Twenty years ago, there was even a dress code -- no T-shirts, no blue jeans, no beards or mustaches, no long hair. Veteran journeymen say the company is less strict today, but the legend of Don Oberg the authoritarian lives on.
Oberg, the 69-year-old president and founder of Oberg Industries, believes passionately that precision products require a disciplined work environment. And that the ideal tool-and-die worker is one with unflagging patience for meticulous, often monotonous, detail who, at the same time, is creative enough to be always on the lookout for better, more efficient ways of getting the job done. A special breed. Carried to the nth degree, the description fits Don Oberg to a tee. He is a man with boundless curiosity and an almost manic obsession with finding ways to improve his company, which is how he came to adopt psychological testing as a standard hiring and promotion aid as early as 1949.
When he started his company in 1948, Oberg was among the first in the tool-and-die industry to see the potential of tungsten-carbide, a material more costly than steel, but one that lasts 15 times as long. Thirty-seven years later, Oberg Industries still makes tungsten-carbide dies. But in an industry immediately hit by any downturns in manufacturing and one that is increasingly vulnerable to foreign competition and overseas manufacturing, Oberg Industries has diversified both its products and its markets. A typical tool-and-die company has about $2 million in annual sales; last year, Oberg racked up $27 million. On the average, employees in tool-and-die shops number 30; Oberg has 320 workers in its main plant and four wholly owned subsidiaries. The company also shines in sales per employee: $84,000 in 1984 compared with the industry average of $67,000.
While Oberg, along with the rest of the tool-and-die industry, is wary of Japanese competition, the company manages to compete successfully with the Japanese in the Hong Kong market. "Oberg is one of the few companies that has out-Japanesed the Japanese," says Myron Tribus, director of the Center for Advanced Engineering Study, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The Japanese know that quality is the way you solve problems. When you strive for quality, all the other things fall in line. Oberg instinctively understood this from the beginning and made it his practice." The company gets away with charging premium prices, 5% to 10% above the industry average. But to people looking for quality, the price is right because the product is right.
American Robot Corp., a $10-million, Pittsburgh-based robotics manufacturer, decided on Oberg when it was looking for a shop to make and assemble some robot arms to thread a needle 40 inches away. Says Bob Gorman, American Robot's vicepresident of engineering, "Because of the degree of precision in this product, we had to find a shop that had the latest computer equipment as well as quality inherent in everything they did. We inspected their shop and they had exactly what we wanted. . . . I saw a complete system that went right down to the people and the way they think. I saw that this was no ordinary company."
Which is just what Don Oberg always intended.
The Oberg philosophy is apparent to visitors even before they enter the main plant. The white brick building sits on a manicured lawn, landscaped with shrubs and rhododendron bushes, which are tended by children of employees who are on vacation from college. To the left of the entrance is an iron bucket filled with sand -- a subtle suggestion to douse cigarettes and a reminder to all of Oberg's personal antismoking crusade. (He even went so far as to offer his 35-year-old son Eric "Rick," $250,000 to quit. The offer was declined.) Before entering the main plant, a sign requests: "Please clean your feet, dirt is our biggest enemy."
That is just the beginning. Inside, Don Oberg's strategically placed small green signs are ubiquitous -- "If it's almost right, it's wrong," "We should strive for progressive improvement rather than postponed perfection," "Let's do the job right the first time," and the one closest to his heart, "The biggest room in our company is the room for improvement." The signs are everywhere -- in the offices of managers, on secretaries' desks, in the waiting room, on the plant walls. Never missing an opportunity to convert a visitor, Oberg has extras stored in a cabinet in his office.
If Oberg's reputation hadn't preceded him, it would seem, upon touring the plant, that some hard-of-hearing maintenance man had mistaken the instructions "keep it clean" for "keep it green." All machinery is special-ordered with what one paint company now refers to as "Oberg green." Somehow, gray machinery always seems to look dirty, even when it isn't, muses Oberg; green is a clean color. And his favorite. The floor is green; even the toilet seats are green. A visitor is hardpressed, however, to find a green shirt at Oberg. Says one employee, "I tell my wife to buy any color -- except green!"
Truth is, whatever color he chose, the plant would still be immaculate. Bad housekeeping is one of Oberg's chief pet peeves, and he makes sure his employees know it. All new hires spend one to two months on the skeleton maintenance staff, a stint that not only gives them a lesson in cleanliness, but also familiarizes them with the entire plant before they are assigned to specific sections. Every day at 4:55, the machines stop, and the housekeeping starts -- each person is responsible for cleaning his or her own work area.
