Like investors and suppliers, employees had every reason to be impatient, as Mitchell well knew. When Tabb hadn't been "cracking the whip," as he labeled his rolling horror show, he'd been promising workers that they would soon be rolling, too -- in money. All those lifeless garage doors of an earlier epoch just craving automatic openers. And GTO offered the only version customers could install themselves. "It was his way of trying to motivate us," says Mark Deemer, a five-year veteran who serves as assembly supervisor. "But anybody in his right mind would know working in an atmosphere like this was not going to make you wealthy."
It wasn't going to make you healthy, either. Tabb, recalls Payne, argued against giving factory workers 10-minute breaks every two hours. They're already sitting down, he would protest. In 1992 the Department of Labor fined GTO for $18,000 in back pay, claiming Tabb had insisted hourly employees work extra hours without paying them overtime. And they weren't always filling gate-opener orders. Phil Wilkins, a former body-shop mechanic who now serves as director of research and development, assembly, and customer service, spent company time fixing Tabb's wrecked cars and restoring his antique-auto collection. Others mounted a basketball goal at his home, built a fence and a barn for his horses, and repaired his aquarium. "Lester would push you as far as you could be pushed," says Wilkins, who joined GTO nearly five years ago.
Now Tabb was gone, and the employees were pushing back. "How long?" The instant it was spoken, other hands immediately wilted. It was the one question everyone wanted answered.
Mitchell had presented as much of his blueprint as he felt ready to share. In essence, it amounted to this: "I do not have a 12-point plan," he said plainly. "But we are going to make things better."
Naturally, he had ambitions for GTO. He told the employees he hoped it would achieve the same recognition as the award-laden company he'd founded 20 years earlier, the improbably named Mad Dog Design & Construction Co. He spent some time lauding Wayne Payne, a popular manager who had brought several of Tabb's inventions to life, including Fan Fast, a device for hanging ceiling fans that for a time brought in $1 million a year, and the automatic gate opener that had launched GTO.
"You have seen more changes in the five months since Lester's death than you will see from me," Mitchell assured the employees. During that time, Lester's daughter Dana had stepped in; according to Payne, "We were running backwards faster than I could believe." Mitchell added that he wanted "to study the situation, get input from you all, and then make changes."
Later he would explain his speech -- which amounted to an appeal for help rather than a rah-rah rallying cry -- like this: "Many of us make the mistake that we feel as if we have to act like we know it all. But the bottom line is that you've got to look within yourself and within the people around you to come up with answers."
As Mitchell faced the GTO workforce, though, he wisely sensed that his audience was not feeling especially metaphysical. How long?
"Give us three months," he said.
* * *
Had Chuck Mitchell sought guidance in how to mend GTO, he might have hired Michael Heifetz, a consultant who specializes in organizational change.
"In a situation like that, you need to get people on your side," says Heifetz, who is based in Olympia, Wash. "You take an action that says to them, 'Hey, this place cares about you."
Or Mitchell could have hit the books, taking in modern management gospel from the likes of Tom Peters and Michael Hammer and maybe committing to memory the time-tested Harvard Change Formula: Ch = D x M x P > C, all of which boils down to saying that for change to be worth it, there must be plenty of discomfort, along with a vision of the future and some plan for getting there.
But by the time Mitchell arrived at GTO he had a much more commanding and unshakable guide: his own experience, which he firmly trusted. "Leaders who transform organizations are attuned to their own inner values," notes Jayme Rolls, a Santa Monica, Calif., consultant who has studied transformational leaders. "They see life from a higher plane. What drives them is seeing others grow and mature." Indeed, to Mitchell's way of thinking, the company's overriding inefficiency was its inability to tap into the inner reserves of its people. More than anything else, he needed to change that and to consult different measurements for his progress. (See "By the Numbers: A Cultural Turnaround," page 7.) It was a cultural turnaround, not a company turnaround, that interested Mitchell.
That distinction is not as subtle as it may sound. After all, GTO was riddled with inefficiencies. Check out, for example, the customer-service department -- if you could find him, that is. Is the finished-goods inventory running low? Nope. It's nonexistent. Tabb believed in a unique concept called just-past-time delivery, in which a large order from a demanding customer like Sam's Clubs would go out at the last minute, requiring everyone to work 24 hours straight. Hey, and how come salespeople are taking down orders for one gate opener rather than directing callers to a nearby dealer? Because with their base salaries, the salespeople need every cent of commission they can get.
Mitchell, a distinguished list maker, spent a few days identifying and prioritizing such obstacles and came up with 110 of them. How could customers take advantage of a 2% discount and still not pay within 30 days of invoicing? It was easy, since there were no procedures for keeping track of collection. Workers' compensation rates were sky-high because everyone in GTO's factory was classified as working with dangerous machinery. And general-liability and business-coverage insurance was 20% higher than it needed to be. Everywhere Mitchell looked, it seemed, he found waste. "I went home with my head in my hands," he says.
Another man might have slumped in his chair and cursed himself for diving into a veritable swamp of a company. Not Mitchell, though. He had, quite literally, lived in a swamp for two decades. And many of the lessons he had learned from the experience would come to bear as he sank to the task of remaking GTO.
