The IPDP system offers practical benefits for the company: managers say it helps them spot talent and ambition that might otherwise be frittered away. Less tangibly, it helps build loyalty. "There's our Saturday safety meetings," says union truck driver Bill Gears, ticking off what he likes about his employer. "There's our training schedules, all the new things we can learn; there's our evaluation, what we plan on doing, what we'd like to accomplish, the IPDP. When you go home knowing that the company cares for you -- well, how does that feel?"
* Recognition. Ken Nabal, batch-plant operator, sits at the computerized control terminal of the Santa Cruz concrete plant. On a table near his chair is a sort of scrapbook, complete with snapshots and homemade captions. The book documents some of the process improvements Nabal and his coworkers helped to implement during the past year or so in their part of the plant's operations: A new system for reclaiming spoiled concrete. A new mechanism for storing and moving raw materials. Several other changes, each one of no interest except to people who work in concrete batch plants. Nabal put the book together himself. No one asked him to, let alone told him to. But he was allowed to do it on company time, and everyone knew it would look pretty good when Recognition Day came around.
Recognition Day is an annual event at every facility. The idea is pretty simple. Top management and guests from other branches show up; they're fed and entertained; and the facility gets to brag about how much it has improved during the past year. The "formal," plantwide Santa Cruz Recognition Day book, prepared (of course) by a team and just a little slicker than Nabal's do-it-yourself rendition, sports pictures of people such as Clarence Thomas, who completed a course in safe lift-truck instruction; Don Birt, who won a company award as a payroll timekeeper; Manuel Garcia, who was employee of the month in January; and three drivers honored for an accident-free five years. In between Recognition Days, employees' accomplishments are likely to be noted in the company's glossy newsletter, "Rock Talk," or in "Tuesday Facts." Annually, more than a hundred employees, including managers, get so-called Incentive Recognition Awards, bonuses of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars that serve both as incentives and as thank-yous for specific achievements.
Corny? Maybe. It all seems to work.
* * *
The cost of all this learning -- the information gathering, the team-based problem solving, the training and the hoopla that make it possible -- is substantial. Training alone costs the company about $1,000 per employee, or roughly $400,000 a year, not counting the considerable time and resources devoted to safety-related training. No one has yet added up the cost of time spent on teams, or of all the information gathering. On the other hand, what's the alternative? Some consultants estimate the average cost of poor quality -- redoing jobs, refunding money, losing customers -- at 30% of sales. Cut that by two-thirds for consultant's exaggeration; even so, the annual bill for an average company of Granite Rock's size would be $9 million. That covers a lot of hours.
More to the point may be Granite Rock's performance in the face of its deep-pocketed competition. Woolpert declines to reveal exact numbers; even so, he claims some remarkable results. Sales increased every year through 1990, turning down only in 1991. Productivity has increased every year, including 1991. The company has remained in the black through the recession. It has kept on gaining market share. Moreover, without the severe price cutting that many companies resort to in a slow economy.
The real constraint on a learning organization like Granite Rock isn't economic, for there's good reason to think that all the company's efforts in that direction pay off. Rather, it's the fact that, once you embark on such a path, there's no going back, and there's no compromising. "We can never have one job where we decide it's just too expensive to fix," says Wes Clark with a sigh, after recounting one particularly horrendous Labor Day weekend when a customer got a load of the wrong concrete. "We can never have a job where we say, 'Let's not call the contractor and tell him we blew it.' Because it isn't just that we don't make the expenditure on that job; we've suddenly torn down the culture. You've got to be consistent. For instance, to have a quarry that isn't the very best we can think of would be inconsistent with the strategy."
Protecting the culture of learning, of improving, of being the best -- that's the most critical task faced by Woolpert, Clark, and the rest of Granite Rock's people. After all, the company has done nothing that its competitors couldn't emulate, and it will always face wage costs that are a little higher than the competition's. Its competitive edge is only what the theorists would have pointed to: the ability to learn faster than everybody else.
That is a fact not lost on Bruce Woolpert as he contemplates his company's future.
"Our competitors are investing in many of the same ways we are. They have engineering departments working to build the best new plants, offering the highest reliability and lowest maintenance costs. We have no monopoly on smart people.
"But I hope by having everyone involved we're doing more things sooner. We may be in certain areas just weeks or months ahead of somebody. Not years. The industry doesn't work that way. These are powerful companies, multibillion-dollar companies, doing business all over the world.
"We can't stand still."
