Henkelman bristled. He had never been content to let others worry about the right way to do things. His father recalls how Henkelman, not much more than a toddler, butted in while his dad was working on a piece of machinery in the yard one day to say, "Hey, Dad, let me wrench that a little while."
Over time Henkelman learned to rely less on the formulas supplied by the lab (which were often no more than lists of ingredients, in no particular order) and more on his own knowledge and experience, which he stored on a shadow set of formula cards. The mill operators all helped one another out. "We'd get these mandates coming from the lab that you got to do it this way or else," Henkelman says. "We did a lot of things under the cover of 'Don't tell nobody that we did this, but we're gonna check this out to see whether it works, because we don't believe the guys in the lab.' And we would succeed, and we'd kinda strut into the lab and, you know, 'Suppose we can try it this way once?' And they'd say, 'Well, OK,' begrudgingly. It's like we didn't know what we were talking about or what we were doing."
It was an elaborate game -- costly, inefficient, demeaning to all parties, and increasingly untenable. As Sandstrom faced growing pressures from quality-conscious customers demanding consistent output the war between the lab and the plant escalated. Profits suffered, and so did morale. Henkelman, after 13 years, was thinking about quitting.
Meanwhile, events were spiraling toward another crisis, this one in Henkelman's personal life. Henkelman, you see, was a drunk, and also a pothead. Finding nothing at work to challenge him, he looked, he says, "into the bottom of a bottle." More and more, he lived for getting wasted. "That was the only reason I showed up for work."
* * *
There were days, more days than he can remember, when he showed up at work with a hangover, and the smell on the plant floor would overwhelm him and he would be sick. One day the alarm went off and he rolled out of bed and into his coat and down the stairs, nearly making it all the way to work before the strange quiet on Main Street led him to examine a newspaper box, which come to find out was filled with Sunday papers. And there was the day following too many lost days spent driving around, drinking beer in his friend's convertible, when he noticed through a hole in his T-shirt a spot of sunburn on his shoulder, and only then wondered how long it had been since he last changed his shirt. The wonder is that he managed to stay employed.
In 1987, after years of slurred roadside apologies to troopers (a wink with a warning to drive straight home was the standard reply), Henkelman finally got arrested and lost his license for three months. That shook him up. By then he was living in Rapids City, the next town downriver from Port Byron, one mile and seven-tenths from the plant. He knows the distance because he walked it every day. His friends offered him rides, but he always refused. He was thinking, "I'd better walk, because if I don't walk, I'm not gonna remember why I gotta ask for a ride."
For a time after that, things were a little better. What started out as a twice-daily 40-minute forced march was, by the end, taking him 25 minutes door-to-door, and he was enjoying the exercise. He lost 20 pounds. He completed a court-ordered counseling program and actually quit drinking for seven weeks. ("I didn't quit smoking dope. I couldn't give them both up," he says.) But then it happened, barely six months after his conviction, that he woke up one morning in bed without the slightest idea how he'd gotten there. It was just like the old days. "It was like the cycle started all over again," he says.
He wasn't ready yet, that's all. What the situation wanted was more time. Time for Henkelman to face up to the fact -- through the slow accumulation of failure, humiliation, and pain -- that "this ain't living." Time to discover, if not a cure, then at least a means to help himself, a way out, which he later found in a 12-step program for substance abusers. Time, finally, for an alternative to present itself, a way to fill the void, if ever he could bring himself not to get wasted anymore . . . something else.
He found it at work, during the late winter of 1991, in the tantalizing promise of open-book management. "Here's a really good reason to not do this," he remembers thinking. "There's opportunities here."
* * *
Before things could get better, they had to get worse. Henkelman had back surgery in August 1990 and missed three months of work. In early November his wife threw him out of the house. They'd been married less than three years, and there were no kids, but that didn't make it any easier for him. The plan had been to straighten his life out by starting a family -- a big family, like the one he'd grown up in -- but the plan had failed. Henkelman was looking into the abyss.
Meanwhile, up on the hill, Jim Sandstrom, Rick Hartsock, and the rest were coming to terms with their own sad set of facts. The company was hemorrhaging cash, losing money for the third year out of the last five -- years during which the company's aggregate income would be a negative number. The situation was dire and called for a radical fix. Sharing numbers, giving up power, letting other people make important decisions about your business: those are not easy things to do. Unless, as Hartsock puts it, "it was do that or die. We didn't have any choice. We were gonna go broke."
So began, in January 1991, Sandstrom Products' experiment in open-book management. Henkelman was skeptical at first. He'd seen so many management fads come and go over the years. "What are they after?" he remembers wondering. "What do they really want?" But what struck Henkelman early on about open-book management was the focus on results, not process -- the simple but radical idea that "we'll tell you what we want, and you guys figure out how to do it." It spoke of trust and respect, which Henkelman craved.
Like many other open-book companies, Sandstrom divided its workforce into teams. Actually, the word team is misleading, if only because it implies competition. The teams exist to divide up the work, but no team operates in a vacuum, and every team has the same goal: to maximize profits. On the third Thursday of every month, Hartsock and vice-president of finance Jim Morrison host a companywide meeting to go over the numbers. If the profits are there, everybody gets a gain-sharing check; if not, then the teams know what they have to do.
