By a sense of community, Compton means a feeling of shared responsibility and destiny -- that everybody at Corsair is in this adventure together. You build that feeling, both he and Byrnes say, by, for instance, letting people make the decisions they'll have to live with. ESL employed some 60 engineers; Corsair couldn't use all of them, and an early task for Compton and the investors was choosing who should remain. In a series of one-on-one and small-group meetings during Byrnes's first week, each ESL engineer was asked who he (they were all men) would like to work with and what he would like his own role to be. Thus, the final group of a little more than 30 was largely self-selected, and the others were quickly invited to leave. "One of the things I learned early in my career," Byrnes says, "is that it's better to have no one in a position than the wrong person." Later, she gave those who stayed a role in choosing the yet-to-be-hired vice-president of engineering. "I got to interview my boss," marvels engineer Kelly Hawkes.
Cross-functional work teams -- there is one for each major customer, for instance -- enhance the sense of community at Corsair. So does the continual sharing of information. At the companywide pizza lunches on alternate Fridays, anybody can ask anybody anything. Byrnes fields questions about the company's financial performance and cash reserves. She asks engineers about manufacturing schedules and how software development is progressing. "Educating people and letting them know what the issues are," says Byrnes, "helps us all to work toward the same goals."
When a big check comes in from a customer, employees don't just hear about it. The check gets passed around; people can see it, touch it, and realize, "I helped make this happen."
Everything moved to a customer focus after the spin-off, says Compton. As soon as Corsair became independent, says Bill Taliaferro, director of product marketing, "Instead of 'Is the government interested in funding what you're thinking?' the issue became 'Do the customers want to buy what you build?' " Whereas at ESL the engineers worked in strictest secrecy, behind security screening devices only a 007 could outwit, at Corsair they meet and work one-to-one with customers, including, Compton says, "the guy who writes the check." Employees have the pager numbers, electronic-mail addresses, and phone numbers of their customer counterparts -- and vice versa. They meet their commitments to customers, notes Compton, because they personally promised they would.
When employees can focus on customer needs instead of on internally fabricated goals, they value their work differently. "I haven't had to do anything since I've been here for which I didn't know the goal, see the result, and understand the reason," says engineer Howard Stoner. "And that was generally not true in at least half of the work I had done in the defense world." And in a lot of civilian companies, too, Stoner could have added.
"It's important that I not make certain decisions," says Byrnes, "because the organization won't make them if I do." Competition makes urgency essential at Corsair, and employees realize that partly because Byrnes expects the people close to an issue to decide it, not bounce it up to her. Compton tries to answer his phone calls and E-mail immediately. "I'll hop on it," he says, "because the signal I want to send is that everything here has to be taken care of in real time."
Individuals and teams are more inclined to meet timetables they set themselves than those handed to them. For instance, engineers told Byrnes they would need six months to solve a technological problem they had already tried to tackle at ESL. "TRW management said, 'You've got six weeks,' " recalls Bob Stoddard, another ESL veteran, "and of course it never got solved. Mary Ann didn't play that game." Byrnes took them at their word, and the team not only solved that problem within the allotted 6 months but also met their 12- and 18-month goals early. "She trusts us," notes Stoddard.
Stoddard and his engineering colleagues -- like Byrnes and Compton -- will become wealthy to the extent that Corsair succeeds, because they all hold stock. Kelly Hawkes has rationally concluded that shared ownership means management "would never deliberately make a really stupid decision that would hurt themselves and therefore me."
One indicator that the radical cultural change from defense contractor to entrepreneurial start-up is having its intended effect on the former ESL employees comes from Jeff Koehler, who -- every bit the engineer -- draws a Venn diagram. "At ESL," he explains, "my work could be represented by a small circle labeled 'Me' inside of a much larger one labeled 'Not Me.' At Corsair, a third circle, nearly as large as the first, is inserted between the other two, and it is labeled 'Maybe Me.' " The point being that at ESL Koehler did what he was told to do and considered the job done; at Corsair, where he's director of engineering, he does whatever needs doing.
Another indicator is the refinements the engineers have made in their product in less than two years. The transmission analyzer is now five times smaller, costs less than half of its former price, and snags 97% (up from 60%) of the fraudulent calls.
A third indicator is financial performance. Corsair posted $8 million in revenues in its first year; it projects $15 million for 1996 and $30 million for 1997. It expects to see profits by 1997 .
The reason Compton and Byrnes created the culture they did was not that it was nicer or that it suited their personalities or that they liked pizza. They did it because they had to; Corsair's culture is its principal competitive weapon. If the company succeeds, it won't be because it has the smartest engineers -- although it might have. It will be because Compton and Byrnes created an environment that's more conducive to motivating and allowing those engineers to get the job done.
Of course, Corsair's managers have so far tackled only the easy part. They've created a culture that works; now they have to maintain it. It's easy to trust people to make their own decisions, create a sense of community, keep everyone focused on the customer, and keep individual goals aligned with the company's when you are working with only 30 people. Size is an advantage that start-up (or spin-off) companies have over larger rivals, but it disappears with success. "When we started we could do anything we wanted," says Byrnes. "We could restructure the operations group, change manufacturing, install a new financial system, design our own payroll and benefits, put the right people in the right positions." Now there are 80 employees, and they can still squeeze into the lunchroom on Friday for pizza. What happens when there are 180? Or 800?
"We can't allow bureaucracy to creep in," says Byrnes. "We need to be sure that the goals we set for serving customers are the same as people's individual performance goals and then reward that performance." Right. Which means that the next chapter of Corsair's story will be about how well Byrnes designs and maintains the kinds of organizational structures, systems, and processes that will nourish, not choke off, the culture she and Compton have created.
And she should sit periodically in that old green chair.
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Alessandra Bianchi can be reached at alessandra.bianchi@inc.com
