Riley made few formal attempts to meet with workers. He got tired of all the griping. They were earning good money; they should be happy. To communicate with employees, he tacked up posters with such catchy slogans as Think Profit. One memorable poster featured a boy and a girl tugging a cart in opposite directions. It was a cautionary tale. Underneath, employees were encouraged, in big, thick letters, to think about TEAMWORK.
That poster was about the only place you could find teamwork. After Riley's executive board evaporated, he decided it would be more efficient to meet with his three top managers -- Epstein, Crawford, and Irwin -- individually. "We got things done, but we were not a team," Crawford says. "There were a lot of hard, strong boundaries."
If Epstein was having a problem collecting from a customer, he'd storm into Crawford's office. "We can't do business with these people," he'd yell. "Cut them off." Crawford -- who would never have been told that the account was trouble -- would calm him down, maybe squeeze some money out of the customer, then sit tight until Epstein came in yelling again. Similarly, Irwin might march into Crawford's office and tell her that she had to get rid of that new retail-clothing account; separating the clothes was taking too much of the dock workers' time. "We never told operations what accounts we were going after," Crawford says. Now, the unhappy salesperson would get stuck having to call up the new customer -- the one he worked so hard to land -- and tell him, sheepishly, that G.O.D. couldn't handle it.
Frustration ricocheted from office to office. If Crawford was mad at Epstein, she went to Riley. If Irwin got steamed at Crawford, he appealed to Riley. The two combatants might arrive at Riley's office at the same time, launching into a screaming match. Whoever could convince Riley won. "He enjoyed for a time the rivalry between us," Crawford says. "He thought it sparked us."
"In the absence of any real corporate values," Riley says, "the owner's personal values take over."
Leave me alone, came the cry from most G.O.D. workers when asked by managers to help a colleague; I'm trying to make my bonus. "You'd ask someone, 'Can you help so-and-so?' " Montorio recalls. "They'd say, 'Oh great, now I have to do his job, too?' " As sales manager, Crawford couldn't direct her staff as a team. She couldn't get them to work together on special campaigns or promotions. "I was managing a group of individuals," she says. "There was no common thread except that they were all motivated by their incentives." Riley reinforced that attitude. One salesman racked up $7,000 in bonuses over six weeks. Riley couldn't get over it. "This guy saved our business," he bragged to anyone who would listen.
With all the hullabaloo about incentives, Epstein says, "we assumed that our best employees were the ones who were making the most money." Riley considered Neil Gross, for instance, a winner. And Riley loved winners. Gross always hit his numbers and consistently brought in more new business than any of his co-workers. He generated so much paperwork that Crawford sometimes fell months behind just processing his bonuses. "I was very motivated," says Gross, a regional sales manager in Philadelphia. "If you're going to offer me an incentive, I'm going to collect it."
Last year Crawford gained some disturbing insight into exactly how Gross was prospering. Although his bonuses indicated that he was bringing in lots of new customers, she wasn't seeing a corresponding increase in sales. When she asked Gross, he readily acknowledged that he spent an hour or so a day combing through the shipper's list picking up credits for even the smallest of his accounts. "Nothing I did wasn't within the system," Gross says. Crawford couldn't argue with him there. If anything, Riley's thirst for growth had pushed employees to get their bonuses any way they could. But look, Crawford said, we don't want you doing this on company time. Fine then, replied Gross. He started coming in an hour earlier.
The salespeople -- Gross wasn't the only one getting around the system -- weren't alone. Sometime later Riley discovered "a little conspiracy among the supervisors to raise the bonuses of a certain group of dock workers." The same dock workers were getting the most lucrative assignments. Worse, some were claiming bonuses for work they hadn't even done, and their supervisors knew it. "Bonuses had a lot to do with how well the dock workers got along with their supervisor," Riley says.
G.O.D.'s winners, it was starting to seem, were those who best figured out how to beat the system. And for every so-called winner, there were many more who felt like genuine losers. "It seemed like I had created a company with too many losers," Riley says. "People were getting pissed off."
If he needed to confirm that, all he had to do was read a letter Epstein had received from the Internal Revenue Service. All companies with more than 500 W-4 forms must file their taxes on magnetic tape, it said. Wait a second, Epstein thought, we don't have anywhere near that many employees. Consulting his master personnel list, he discovered that G.O.D. had employed nearly 700 people in 1987 -- for roughly 200 jobs. When Epstein relayed his discovery, "Everybody was astounded that we had run through so many people," he says. "And we didn't know what was causing it."
