Three: Assume that your employees are partners rather than hired hands. That doesn't mean just being nice to them, it means treating them the way you would a business partner. Partners expect to have access to information about the company, and to take part in decisions that affect their work lives. They expect to make sacrifices when business is bad and to share in the rewards when business is good.
Utopian? Tell it to Mike Cudahy and Warren Cozzens, founders of fast-growing Marquette Electronics Inc., in Milwaukee. There, employees get the company's financials every quarter -- and aren't shy about challenging expenditures they don't approve of. (They once voted down a Cudahy-sponsored plan for a million-dollar health center.) Or tell it to Jack Stack of Springfield Remanufacturing Center Corp. (SRC), who not only lets his employees know every day how the company is doing, but also asked them to decide, in a recent crisis, whether anyone should be laid off (``Crisis Management by Committee," May). SRC not only weathered the loss of a mammoth order, it even grew 5%.
Levering's book has its weaknesses. Its reporting is at times uneven. Its discussion of management theorists such as Peter Drucker and Tom Peters is shallow, even petty. And INC. readers will wish the author spent more time at smaller companies, which are often more imaginative about employee motivation than the larger corporations he focuses on. Still, a book that provides so much insight into so difficult a problem -- a problem that's likely to get worse rather than better in the years to come -- can be allowed a few failings. You can ignore Levering's lessons if you want to. But you do so at your peril.
* * *
BETWEEN HARD COVERS
Books from our writers
The Third Century: America's Resurgence in the Asian Era, by INC. West Coast editor Joel Kotkin and Yoriko Kishimoto, is being published this month by Crown Publishers. (See [Article link] for an excerpt.)
BOOK OF THE MONTH: TECHNOLOGY AND THE WORKER
Suddenly trust is more important than ever
In the computerized pulp and paper mills studied by Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff, managers didn't like to see control-room workers leaning back in their chairs with their feet on the desks. "We have created a lazier operator," said one, ignoring the fact that the operator's work no longer involved walking around the production facility. When the job is monitoring computer screens, "work" is what takes place inside the operator's head.
The transformation of work by computers is the subject of Zuboff's wide-ranging new book, In the Age of the Smart Machine (Basic, 1988). Information technology, she argues, allows two essentially different managerial strategies. Managers can use computers to tighten their control over workers, counting keystrokes and otherwise monitoring effort to the point at which workers become demoralized, form a union, or quit. Or they can use computers to "informate" their organizations. The word is a Zuboff coinage; it means giving frontline employees access to the information they need to control their work and learn new responsibilities.
Put so starkly, the choice seems obvious. But Zuboff found plenty of situations in which managers were too shortsighted or too threatened to use computers for anything but ever-tighter control. "We have not given the operators the skills they need to exercise . . . judgment," admitted one, "because we don't trust them." If they have their feet up, they must not be working.
To her credit, Zuboff doesn't simply criticize: she analyzes why managers frequently feel threatened by computers (and why workers themselves are uncomfortable with them). She also describes instances in which computers really did expand employees' jobs, to the company's benefit. Another paper mill, for example, instituted a computerized cost-monitoring system that allowed operators to modify production variables on an hour-by-hour basis. In the first year the system saved $456,000.
Like most academics, Zuboff has a fondness for ten-dollar words when two-dollar ones would do, and now and then she ascends into a fantasyland of philosophizing. Still, this is a book that's rich with the insights of history, psychology, and sociology -- and that has immediate relevance for managers coping with the introduction of new technology.
GOING PUBLIC REDUX
The one that got away
In June we surveyed available books on how to take your company public. You missed one, some callers told us: it's Going Public, by Martin Weiss (Liberty House, 1988) -- which, as it happens, was published shortly after our review appeared.
Is it the book we were looking for? Not exactly. There are only 87 pages of text, and the author (a former chief financial officer of Kulicke & Soffa Industries Inc., a semiconductor equipment manufacturer), devotes many of them to such matters as how to calculate earnings per share. He is also careful to define all his terms -- including stock analyst, investment banker, and over-the-counter market.
Most CEOs, in short, will find it pretty elementary, though if you've never had a lick of financial education you may want to start with this one and go on to some of the Big Eight booklets we recommended in June. One word of warning: Weiss makes four separate plugs for hiring a financial consultant to help you pick an investment banker. And what does Weiss do now? He "owns and operates a consulting firm specializing in identifying and solving business problems in the areas of finance. . . . '
Contributor: Paul B. Brown
