In the aftermath of her four failed handoffs, Fox vows to finally confront the one obstacle to developing management that she has never really challenged before: herself. "I will change things," she says. "I know that the only thing I really have control over is me."
With hardly any experienced management left, and a company too big to run by her lonesome, she does not have an overwhelming number of choices. "Mary Lou has a lot of fortitude," observes Schrader, "but you have to wonder sometimes whether it is just wearing her down." It is. Fox will never admit to the pain of having all those managers -- the good ones she hired -- leave. But she can't ignore it anymore, either. "There comes a point when you've got to let go of the reins," says Cryan. "I don't think she's been trained to do that. She hasn't been exposed to mentors to see how they've done it."
Just as Fox built Westhaven in her own, difficult way, so she is disengaging from it. Part of what pushed her -- whether she's aware of it or not -- seems to have been the death of her husband last spring. And age. Hitting their sixties, most entrepreneurs feel the pull of the "heritage motive," according to Eric Flamholtz, a professor of management at UCLA who has studied how founders let go of their companies. "You begin to know that you won't go on forever, and you start tidying up your life." Clearly, events in Fox's life have given her some new distance and perspective. "I'm living this place, and I really don't want to be," she says bluntly.
She has begun to let certain responsibilities trickle down. For instance, Fox won't hire anymore. "I'm no good at it," she says, "and that's a fact." Six months ago she handed over to Bucci her duties as head of the Med Error Task Force, which examines mistakes on a monthly basis. Bucci widened its membership and renamed it the Quality Assurance Committee. Bucci has also started the Team Management Circle, a group of a dozen or so employees who have tackled various issues, from planning parties to setting up a suggestion system.
Most of the people around Fox would probably worry if she gave up her party planning; letting go of everything at once is almost a surefire way to a backlash. But those who know her contend she is actually evolving. "Mary Lou looks at her managers differently," confirms Suzanne Neuber, an original star performer who agreed in July to return as a consultant pharmacist. "She's giving them authority. She no longer looks at them as her little children." Fox, Neuber says, no longer intervenes in every customer problem but asks managers to keep her informed through written reports. Vice-president Greg Lawless says he senses that "lessons have been learned. Mary Lou, I think, is looking sincerely at building a core of management that can carry this company forward." Fox, he says, now wants to build an actual sales force, with people making calls and meeting quotas. Astoundingly, most Westhaven business still comes in by word of mouth.
Fox has other management plans as well. She plans to revive her concept of splitting the company into teams. This time she'll choose the team captains more carefully, for their leadership skills, and offer some formal training. She is also pushing new management tools that, rather than consolidate her control, "reduce caring to a system." Fox plans to go to meetings, rather than dominate them, and simply "share the philosophy of this company."
She's not sure exactly what she'll do with Westhaven when the time comes to part from it; she's been collecting information about employee stock ownership plans. That may not be the exit she's been searching for -- although she fears that if she sold Westhaven to someone else, the new owner "will want me to stay, and I won't work in a situation where I don't have control" -- but she needs some future for herself. "I need a step two. It's fearful to do it any other way," she says.
Most entrepreneurs need to replace the company with something else: family, philanthropy, another company. Fox has thought about starting a sales-promotion company. She seems on the verge of accepting that there might be a different, though not necessarily better, way to run Westhaven. "You've got to settle for 90%," Fox says. "No one can do it the same way you can." She sounds resigned when she says this, remaining either unwilling or unable to consider the possibility that someone could make Westhaven better than she has. She continues to make that most congenital of entrepreneurial mistakes: assuming that anything done differently than she would do it is by definition done less well. But perhaps just by beginning to tolerate differentness, she has taken a step toward recognizing that others' ideas can be as valuable as her own.
Who knows if Fox will really be able once and for all to successfully confront her need for control? Like most entrepreneurs, she deeply fears not being needed. Even with all that's going on, says Lawless, "you can't be blind to history."
In truth, you can't miss it. One recent morning Fox was giving a tour of the company when she came across a lab coat a technician had carelessly tossed over a chair rather than hung up. Fox grabbed the jacket and instinctively went through the pockets. Finding only car keys -- no drugs, thank goodness -- she handed the coat over to a supervisor. "Tell this person that Mrs. Fox found the coat. That ought to scare him," she said, running off to her next meeting.
"After all," she added with a touch of self-mockery, "I am the boss around here."
