The Cultural Evolution

Managing growth

People dressed as fairies, a CEO who dispenses fines, and a tradition of publicizing mistakes. Empower takes its culture very seriously

Let's start with dessert.

So there you are, trying to land a job at Empower Trainers & Consultants (#47), sharing a delicious evening meal with Michael May, the company's chief executive, and his wife, Caroline, who founded the business back in 1990. Sprinkled around the dinner table are a few Empower associates--there are no "employees," as you by now have learned--from the business unit you hope to be joining. So, says the perennially bow-tied May, what'll you have for dessert?

You've been through maybe a dozen interviews over a period of several months, starting with a few basic interrogations, and then moving on to group interviews and a grilling by the company's technology contingent. You've been pelted with queries ranging from "Do you like Taco Bell?" to "If you had a warning label, what would it say?" to "What three things are most important in your job?" You've proved your proficiency with Visual Basic and Windows NT. Even if you've got some doubts--maybe you're not sure how you feel about the raucous Ping-Pong tournaments or the hallway Foosball competitions--you're probably not thinking that everything, everything, depends on how you respond to the dessert issue.

But it does, and you are about to commit a fatal blunder. Oh, you reply with a reflexive pat of the belly, I don't do dessert. Nothing can save you now.

Well, nothing except a quick change of heart. If you're lucky, the neighboring Empower employee--though, for your sake, let's hope you haven't used that label--may turn to you and say, in a stage whisper: We've had 11 interviews--you've come this far, don't blow it! If you're still resistant, perhaps your dessert-friendly significant other will sense the growing tension and order something for the both of you. Maybe, just maybe, you'll get the job after all, making you that rare one out of 250 that actually survives the trek from applicant to new hire. "We've been a lot more aggressive about seeking the applicants we want," says May, 35.

May always seems to know what he wants. The dessert maneuver may sound as flaky as coconut chiffon pie, but like every other company ritual, there are several rationales underlying it. One: It's fun, and fun is strategic at Empower. So it follows that anybody who adores dessert and who will boldly ask for it in the presence of people he or she has just met can't be all bad. Two: Dessert smokes out the real person behind the tailored suit. It's difficult to take yourself too seriously while you're slurping a caramel sundae. Three: There is something indelibly optimistic about the whole idea of dessert that suits a growing company's way of doing things. In his letter to new associates, May advises them to "stay optimistic about the future and, above all, have fun with what you are doing." Last, there's the commonsense kicker: A dessert course buys more time, and--who knows--an extra 20 minutes might make a tremendous difference. Even Empower's sales reps are coached (by May himself, for crying out loud) to order dessert when they take clients to lunch, the better to get to know them.

And the better May knows the job candidates, the easier it is for him to judge whether they will fit into the type of company he's serious about building: smart, productive, and kooky. Not a bad description of May himself, whose previous employment included a stint at Apple Computer Inc., where he made his mark as one of the company's five top salespeople, hitting 225% of his $11-million annual quota. Before that, he served as an electrical engineer at Ross Perot's Electronic Data Systems (EDS), where he helped design and build program systems for 200 robots, 135 automated guided vehicles, and two large automated storage and retrieval systems. "After a while, it got dull," he says. "Robots are neat and interesting, but they always do what you tell them. Boring."

Not that May can't get humans to do what he wants, namely help create "a billion-dollar valuation and a billion-dollar company--an ongoing, living entity that can't be stopped." But it requires all the creativity he can muster. When one of Empower's business units needs an infusion of talent to keep growing, May has been known to offer his own people headhunting incentives in the form of stock options. "We've said, 'Tell us who you know, tell us who's great, and let's see if we can get them here," May explains. More important, he stresses, "we've got the whole organization thinking and attacking this as a group."

That unity of purpose is exactly what Michael May is aiming for, whether he's insisting that someone order dessert or watching as one of his, uh, associates prances around in a fairy costume and sprinkles his or her colleagues with--well, we'll get to that. And when we do, believe it or not, it may actually make sense.

"I just picked up stuff everywhere I went," says May, in what turns out to be his shrewdest dissection of the distinctive culture he's created at the $6.5-million company, which delivers computer training, applications development, and Internet instruction to clients like Saturn, Hallmark, and the city of Overland Park, the leafy suburb of Kansas City where Empower is based. May isn't being wily, nor is he trying to protect some of his sharpest competitive tools from being stolen by someone else. In fact, he'll readily own up to having borrowed some of his favorite ideas from others. He'll even identify them by name: entrepreneur-turned-populist Perot, Visa founder Dee Hock, and the late Ewing Marion Kauffman, who in 1950 founded Marion Labs in Kansas City, and who later bought the Royals and built the team into a baseball powerhouse.