Jay Finegan

Four-star Management

 

"I could paint all of TAC for the price of one F-15," he says. "My philosophy is that if equipment is shabby looking, it affects your pride in your organization and your performance. You can't preach to a young man that an airplane can be shabby on the outside but has to be spic-and-span on the inside. You either have a climate of professionalism, or one of deterioration and decay. You can't segment it. Only on TV do you have these Black Sheep squadrons. Good outfits look sharp and act sharp. The great pilots -- the Chuck Yeagers -- are not sloppy people."

Fresh paint gave way to murals and lounges and comfortable furniture in flight-line facilities, and then to new barrack complexes with carpeted rooms and semiprivate baths. And while pilots had formation flybys to show their stuff to the public and the brass, squadron vehicle fleets held annual "roll-bys" displaying their gleaming trucks and vans.

It was all part of General Creech's emphasis on respect and recognition for his people. "Pride is the fuel of human accomplishment," he preached to his command. And competition was the spark plug. To drive home the point, annual awards banquets, complete with citations and trophies, were held at every wing, to recognize the year's best maintenance and supply specialists.

By the time General Creech left TAC, 85% of his airplanes were rated as mission capable, and jets were averaging 21 sorties a month, with 29 hours in the air. In wartime, TAC was capable of launching 6,000 sorties a day, double what it had been when he arrived at Langley. In peacetime, the crash rate had dropped from one for every 13,000 flying hours to one for every 50,000 -- and crashes traced to faulty maintenance nearly vanished.

TAC, under Creech, had gone from the Air Force's worst command to its best. For much of the time, it had been a battle, and heads had rolled. The lazy and the incompetent, who had found numerous hiding places in a centralized structure, were smoked out when maintenance operations moved to the flight line and squadrons were held accountable for their performance. Some had to leave. But many more decided to stay. In 1983, two-thirds of the first-term mechanics decided to reenlist, or nearly double the rate of 1977, the year before Creech took command. Second-termer retention rates went from 68% to 85% over the same period. And some of the older technicians found they liked Creech's program so much that they recalled retirement papers to see it through.

TAC commanding officers thrived under the new system. Of the 148 wing commanders who served under Creech, only about 3% were relieved for poor performance -- fewer than under any of Creech's three predecessors. "It was not a ruthless system," Creech emphasizes. "You just don't get results by going around chopping people's heads off."

Even in retirement, Creech's philosophy sets the tone for Air Force management. General Larry D. Welch, now the Air Force Chief of Staff, served in staff positions under Creech. He later went on to head up the Strategic Air Command, the nation's nuclear strike force, where decentralization also became a battle cry.

Even the Pentagon has got the religion. A recent Pentagon directive gives commanders new authority to abolish regulations, streamline procedures, and do whatever they think best to enhance mission accomplishment. "People doing the job day in and day out know better how to do it than some guy who is sitting behind a desk," asserts William H. Taft IV, deputy secretary of defense.

As for Creech, now 59, he continues to spread the gospel to leaders of industry and government as a lecturer, consultant, and corporate board member.

In his travels, Creech remarks how common it is for executives to think of decentralization and delegation as loss of control and abdication of command. If anything, he says, just the opposite is true: "When I left TAC, I had more control over it than my predecessors. I'd created leaders and helpers at all those various levels. Without that kind of network below you, you're a leader in name only.

"It's not really that hard to run a large organization," the general explains. "You just have to think small about how to achieve your goals. There's a very finite limit to how much leadership you can exercise at the very top. You can't micromanage -- people resent that. Things are achieved by individuals, by collections of twos and fives and twenties, not collections of 115,000. And that's as true in industry as it is in the military."

FOUR-STAR MANAGEMENT

* Workers are more professional when provided with a professional environment.

* Workers take more responsibility when they have a sense of ownership.

* Management control is established through motivation, not regulation.

* Consolidation and centralization can lower output as well as costs.

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