LESLIE BROKAW
Researcher/reporters don't get out much. Unlike full-fledged writers, who collect frequent-flyer miles with the same intensity that 11-year-olds collect baseball cards, we spend our days poring over statistics in dimly lit public libraries, inhaling trade journals and regional business magazines, and talking on the phone to people we've heard about, read about, and may someday write about.
Traveling, for us, comes in pushing away from our computer terminals, kicking up our feet, and trying to see the places/faces/rear-window views of people whose lives we briefly enter. It's a fairly presumptuous intrusion: give me not just information, but a series of spoken snapshots if you can, please.
My file drawer holds those images: southern poultry farmers tending rows of downy chicks in barns plunked amid tobacco fields, engineers tinkering over blueprints of satellites that will one day shoot manufacturing stations into the stars, a recording studio that aims to be the hippest and serve the funkiest. But my favorite mental postcards come from an Inc. 500 company out in Winslow, Wash., a town of 2,196 on Puget Sound. It's there that Julie Just and the five-person staff of Just Fish Inc. buy and trade Pacific rock fillets, sockeye salmon, and halibut.
It's not that I like fish all that much. It's only that the picture our conversations evoked of Julie Just in green waders, ragg sweater, and rain slicker, heading down to the docks in the early-morning mist to greet the fishing boats, pick out the best of the catch, ice them up, heave them into a refrigerated truck, and send them off to a processor -- well, it sounded so romantic.
When Just told me about her deals with fishermen north in the Alaskan waters, where everything seems so rugged and lush and practical, for a few moments I slipped away from the office. Sorry, Leslie isn't here. She's out. On assignment. Drifting, in a canoe perhaps.
BO BURLINGHAM
I've seen all kinds of great companies in my six years at Inc. -- companies with inspiring management systems, brilliant marketing strategies, ingenious financing schemes, terrific R&D programs, and so on. Even the greatest companies have an Achilles' heel, however, and it almost always involves the role played by the CEO. I often find myself looking at the company, wondering: what would this place be without the wonderful person who founded it, provided the vision, created the structure, and still guides it? The answer, usually, is disaster. Most would be totally transformed within six months.
One major exception is Springfield Remanufacturing Center Corp. (SRC), the former International Harvester division that appeared on our August 1986 cover ("The Turnaround"). Its management system is based on the premise that business is essentially a game -- one, moreover, that almost anyone can learn to play. As with most games, however, people won't bother to learn it unless they get it. That means, first, they must understand the rules; second, they must receive enough information to let them follow the action; and third, they must have the opportunity to win or lose.
And that's exactly how the company is run. Every week the department heads hold a meeting at which they go over the income statement, comparing actual performance with monthly goals. Each department head then goes back and does the same thing with the supervisors, who repeat the process with the workers on the shop floor. From top to bottom, people in the company really do understand what the business is about -- what it takes to be successful, what role everybody plays. Management and workers set the targets, work together to meet them, and share in the rewards. You've got to see it to believe it.
As a result, the company has had extraordinary performance through good times and bad. A leveraged buyout, it has reduced its debt-to-equity ratio from 89-to-1 to about 1.8-to-1, while its net operating income has gone from negative numbers to 6% in 1988. Yet no one is indispensable to the company, not even Jack Stack, the guy who put the whole thing together. SRC is, in my opinion, the best-managed company in the United States and a model for what American business will have to become in the twenty-first century.
CURTIS HARTMAN
For a business journalist it was the assignment of a lifetime: for three months during the spring of 1985 I traveled around the country, tape recorder in hand, preparing a special section for Inc. called "The Spirit of Independence: Voices from America's Economic Frontiers." Many of the 120 people I spoke with were nationally known figures: Mary Kay Ash and T. Boone Pickens, Joel Hyatt and Frank Borman, William Hewlett and David Packard. Others came from academe, from the Inc. 500, or from the world of politics. Invariably they were high-powered and articulate, and justifiably proud of their accomplishments.
But they weren't the people I would remember best from those three months. Nor were their stories -- interesting as they were -- as compelling as the tale I heard from the three cofounders of a dingy 10-year-old aluminum-forging plant just outside Los Angeles.
In Hollywood they'd call the story of Independent Forge Co. high concept: three factory workers who bought a factory of their own. But no screenwriter would expect an audience to believe what Rosie Ruiz, Irma Diaz, and Kwok Ming Wong went through to create what they called "our own little thing."
Every entrepreneur I met talked about their motivation for setting out on their own, their frustration at the lack of opportunity or the lack of control over their own destiny that made them finally take the plunge. But these three partners had endured those frustrations for 17 years, relegated to the dirtiest jobs in the factory, discriminated against because of race and sex. Every entrepreneur I met had battled to raise the capital they needed. But none of them had managed to save what they needed out of a salary just over minimum wage, working overtime and weekends, giving up vacations, scraping together the $30,000 they needed to buy their own forging machine and set up shop.
