They could feel it happening. In those early days, everybody answered the phone. "We'd do anything to make customers happy. And we were always very energetic when we answered the phone," May says. As the company grew, the newest hire was assigned phone duty. "We kept trying to get people to answer the phone a certain way, and it wasn't working," May says. That's when Susan Burden, the first person to join Empower after Michael and Caroline, dreamed up Sparkle and captured in a single, economical word the sort of persona an Empower associate should always project.
Gussied up as the "Sparkle Fairy," Burden showered her fellow associates with glitter and recited a poem she'd written for the occasion: "This Sparkle Powder I give you today / Will empower you in a special way! / We hope you will always keep this in mind, / To make Empower one of a kind."
Burden is home now with two young children, but the Sparkle tradition endures (along with the fairy costume). Every other Tuesday, from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Empower's regular companywide team meeting (which covers "everything from business-unit updates to zany associate antics," according to the Associate Handbook), everyone recites the poem, and the new associates then get sparkled by a full-scale team of Sparkle Fairies and put on a skit of their own. To that eccentric mix May has added a musical twist: Frank Sinatra's rendition of "Young at Heart," which is played at every Sparkle ceremony. "What's interesting," May explains, "is finding Sparkle in somebody who's an SQL 6.5 programmer who's been in a cube somewhere for three years. You've just got to bring that person into a different environment."
What may sound way too strange is nonetheless an enormously important, though grossly undervalued, means to stabilize any company that's growing as fast as Empower. For all its conspicuous poofiness, Sparkle is cultural ballast: it makes tangible--turns into words and deeds that can be nurtured and repeated--the company's uniqueness, thereby boosting the odds that it will stay that way. It's what helps make Empower the kind of company where you might talk ROIs and IPOs one minute (May hopes to take Empower public in 1998) and be chased by a squirt-gun-wielding colleague the next.
And, of course, in the technical-training business, where certain standard content must be covered, success rests on the trainer's sparkly personality and on a learning-is-fun approach that makes students want to come back for more (or not). "People are very scared of computers," May says. "So when they walk into the classroom, the first person who works up the nerve to ask a question is tossed some candy. Everybody goes, 'Hey, I'm gonna ask a question now." Everybody, that is, except students from AT&T, who are left out for occupational safety's sake (AT&T's idea). No airborne Snickers for these low-lying students, but they can and do take advantage of all the fresh-baked (every afternoon in Empower's kitchen) cookies they can whomp down during breaks. In keeping with one of the company's very scarce written policies--and to prevent raids on the refreshments--leftovers only (bagels and doughnuts after 11 a.m., cookies after 4 p.m.) are up for grabs by Empower staff.
Empower's 68-word "Cookie and Bagel/Doughnut Policy" is more than three times as long as its mission statement. That underscores May's message that a company reveals its values not only through its grandest rituals but also in its everyday habits. At Empower, if anyone uses the word employee, boss, or manager, the offender must immediately ante up $5 a word, dropping the cash into a bank shaped like a big yellow crayon. In an average year, May collects about $75 for charity.
May insists that he isn't out to censor anyone. Rather, he wants everyone to remember that Empower has no "employees" because, as he says, the mind-set that goes with that is enfeebling and not well suited to thinking. The company aims to support associates, by contrast, who are fully capable of independent, rational thought and are actually pretty good at it. Issues that affect everyone are put to a majority-rule vote, ranging from removing the limit on sick days (approved), to installing an associate stock purchase plan (more than 90% of the company said yes), to trying a performance-based pay plan (it lost, but May hasn't given up).
May's EDS-bred belief that it's important to look good around customers led to another of the company's very few original policies--a dress code. The issue burned up the floor at several companywide sessions. May pushed: you can't go wrong looking nice in front of clients. Associates pushed back: does the CEO have the right to enforce a dress code? And what about programmers, who need quiet, comfortable environments to be optimally productive? (They'd researched that point and presented their findings at one of the meetings.) And what does it say about a leader who doesn't trust his associates with decisions about their own wardrobes?
Finally, in the summer of 1996, May bowed to the group's authority. "The organization decides what it needs, and it makes that call," he says. But in caving in, he did attach this postscript: "If we don't take our appearance seriously," he warned, "it will cost us a lot in profit sharing and profitability." May knows where his associates live.
That same practicality informs his outlook on blunders. "If you're not making seven mistakes a day," May says, "you're just not trying hard enough." In the interest of high-speed learning, the folks who work at Empower are exhorted to post "Today's List of Mistakes," a page with seven numbered blank lines. Those who comply with this corporate challenge record their stumbles and tack them up on the door for all to see. They trust, apparently, that May won't use such data against them (relying perhaps on a slogan promoted by Jay Accurso, Empower's recently arrived president: Assume positive intent). To spread that information speedily, Empower is putting together a sort of doozie database, so that every humiliating goof can become part of the company's learning curve, never to be repeated. "If mistakes are hidden, they remain land mines," May says.
