Soon things were falling through the cracks. Pat Morreira, then a new hire in the warehouse, remembers serving on a team that ordered a set of lockable drawers for employees' tools, which were getting lost or borrowed too often. The drawers arrived, but no one seemed to know or care who was responsible for installing them. A little while later, the teams were reshuffled. His new team, says Morreira, never proposed much of anything. Eventually, the drawers were shipped back.
For some, it was all too much. The warehouse manager quit. The marketing manager quit. Cinde Braccini didn't quit, but neither was she a convert. On the day Steve announced he was pulling back from daily involvement with the sales department, he and Cinde had a shouting match in full view of the salespeople. He was crazy, she said, to give up control. It would send the company down the tubes. She stalked out, slamming the door behind her. Over the year, remembers Steve, there were probably three such blowups and numerous little disputes, all over the teams or the redistribution of authority. Cinde doesn't disagree. "I'd walk in on certain days and say, 'Well, is it bad enough now? Can we stop?' He'd say no, and I'd say, 'Well, I have to leave. I can't watch this.' To me, it was the inmates' running the asylum."
Early in the year Steve broached the idea that Cinde might be happier at home. She set up a home office and began coming in less frequently. By fall, though, her visits to Pro were more numerous, and the disagreements only got worse. Steve steeled himself and finally told her. Now was the time to go. Really go. She left.
By the end of 1991, a year and a half after Steve had come back from the clinic, Pro Fasteners was poised, gingerly, on a cusp.
On the one hand, Braccini's plans for growth were clicking into place. For all the uncertainties, the teamwork and training had paid off: the company was raising its quality to near-perfect levels. In March, April, and May, for example, Pro was late on only 96 out of 11,500 lots shipped to Applied Materials. By August the figure was down to 20 out of 13,000 and falling. In September Pro landed the Austin contract. A month later a new general manager, Robert Landau, came on board. Soon Braccini had signed an agreement with IBM for the million-dollar computer system, to be installed in December. The time seemed ripe, moreover, for a big new sales push in Silicon Valley. The customer list was growing, with more than 400 companies a month buying from Pro. Many of those customers were interested in contracts, and Pro could offer them capabilities the competition simply couldn't match. Landau began laying plans to hire more salespeople.
On the other hand, there were no two ways about it: morale was terrible. By November the teams were no longer meeting. The CIC had tried giving them issues to work on; then it had decided the teams would be primarily vehicles for training. But demoralization had set in, and the CIC itself was stumbling. Paul Hathaway, one of five members, decided he'd better quit; his job was suffering. So did Carl Ericsson in sales. They met no opposition from their managers. "I think the council is great; the company needs it," says sales manager Carlos Bombino. "But I can't afford to put my salespeople on it. It takes too much of their time."
Braccini, toting up the year's accomplishments and costs, felt morale problems of his own. He had lost some of his key managers, including Cinde. (Yes, both Braccinis acknowledge, the whole thing strained their marriage; yes, they got over it.) With Landau still new, everyone was stretched thin trying to fill in. Then too, Braccini had spent a whopping $200,000 on training, better than $4,000 for every employee, not counting the time everyone spent away from work. Now, though business was up a little over the previous year, profits had dropped by half. Pro was supposed to be poised for a Great Leap Forward, bringing on the new computer, branching out, going for a quantum jump in sales. But would it have any money in the till?
Ruefully, Braccini sat down with Landau to do some cost cutting. Their first target was health insurance, which Pro had always bought for both employees and dependents. Starting next month, the two men announced, the company would buy insurance only for employees. If you bought additional insurance for dependents, the premiums would be deducted from your paycheck.
For the employees, it was a bleak day in a bleak time. They'd been through the training and the teamwork; they'd heard the rhetoric of responsibility and pyramid inversion; they'd made the improvements that seemed to be preparing Pro for a bright new future. Now they couldn't fathom what was going on. The new boss, Landau, was still a question mark. Was this insurance business his doing, or was it Steve's? And what about the new computer system -- would it automate people out of a job? Shortly before Pro closed for a holiday break, Michelle Thibaudeau and a colleague went to see Steve. You'd better do something, they said; morale has never been worse.
* * *
And yet when I visit -- it is now almost three months later -- morale doesn't seem so bad at all. Not Steve's, and not anybody else's.
For one thing, business has picked up. January sales were up, February's rose still further, and March appears to be hitting record levels. Braccini's plans for future growth are one step closer to fruition. The AS/400 computer has been installed and will soon be up and running. Landau expects to land about 14 major contracts this year, totaling some $4 million in new business. "We have 500 or 600 items we're putting on contract with them," confirms Ruth Kavanaugh, purchasing supervisor for Coherent Medical Group, in Palo Alto, Calif. "We want a long-term relationship." Braccini estimates that 1992 profits will be 6%, about triple the industry average.
Even though the action teams haven't met since November, people talk about little changes they've implemented on their own to make things work better. Dave Sarmago, taking over as warehouse manager, has initiated a kind of open-book management, making sure his employees have access to weekly sales figures and helping them keep track of how the warehouse is doing compared with its budget. Cheryl Caglia, hired not long ago in purchasing, has begun tracking vendors' on-time-delivery perfor-mance. In short, the training and the pyramid inversion that Steve Braccini set in motion seem to have had an indelible effect, action teams or no. "One of the great things about this company," says Paul Hathaway, "is that management listens to the regular workers." That culture is not lost on customers. "They're really an employee-oriented company," says Kavanaugh of Coherent Medical. "And people that are happy to go to work do well for their customers."
