The Cultural Evolution

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I'm drifting 1,000 feet above Kansas countryside, one of four passengers balanced like bowling pins in a wicker basket hitched to a giant multicolored balloon. When I look down, I see subminiature cows clumped near hay bales the size of sugar cubes.

A couple of years back, May was transfixed by a balloon-festooned picture postcard he saw during a trip to Reno, Nev. Thinking that an Empower balloon sounded like loads of fun, he wrote such a message on the verso of that very postcard, which he duly mailed to Toby Brown, an Empower technical trainer who is also, as it happens, a Federal Aviation Administration­licensed hot-air-balloon pilot. Now the balloon has not only an aviator but also a couple of official sponsors (Microsoft Corp. and the Weather Channel) that help pay for it. The balloon has even spun off its own corporation, Air Promotions, which at special events flies enormous banners emblazoned with customers' names. There's an Empower Balloon Team that competes in rallies and races; customers and suppliers vie for hourlong rides.

In the hands of another entrepreneur, the balloon-as-corporate-symbol could turn trite fast: we're high-flying, we're independent spirits, we're fearless. But because May owns the company's culture in a way so few entrepreneurs do, none of it--not even the windowless, white-boarded conference room labeled the Aquarium or the regulation Ping-Pong table that sits outside the president's office--seems gimmicky. May counts on Empower's loosely linked, self-managing structure to enable him to get away from the office more than most CEOs would dare. Last year he spent 16 weeks away, 4 of them on a fly-fishing expedition in Siberia.

He seems so genuine about it all, not proud of himself for pulling it off. But as my balloon ride bounces to an end--landing in a grassy, clover-specked field about 30 minutes south of Overland Park--my giddiness succumbs to a need to test him on his own terms. Answering my questions isn't enough.

Then it hits me: the bow tie is a fake. I venture, casual-like, into May's office and ask him point-blank: could he please untie his bow tie (dark green with a fly-fishing motif) and retie it, right this minute, while I'm sitting there? For just a second he stares at me as if I've just come in from Venus on that balloon. But he doesn't flinch. With a little tug, he loosens the bow (no clip on). He begins to retie it, and all the time he's narrating the procedure--place A over B; loop it here, like this; catch B and pull it through--so I'll learn something. After two botched attempts, he prevails. He's managed it without a mirror. "What do you think?" he asks.

When I say it looks pretty darn good to me, I mean it.

Culture in a can: Outsourcing Your Company's Persona

Perhaps every Inc. 500 company should grow its own distinctive culture. But, hey, who has the time?

Not Leonard Pacheco, president and CEO of Excell Data Corp. (#116), a software-services consulting firm based in Bellevue, Wash. Pacheco, whose $24-million company has grown more than 1,600% over the past five years, recognized the need to build the kind of workplace that would attract and keep top-of-the-line talent. But he also recognized that his schedule made him an unlikely candidate for carrying that out. So he outsourced it.

"Having someone come in from the outside speeded things up," Pacheco explains. That someone was Rob Lebow, a consultant and former director of marketing communications at Microsoft Corp. Lebow had devised an eight-pronged "Shared Values Process" as the groundwork for building what he called the "Heroic Environment." If Bill Gates could invent an operating system for personal computers, Lebow had wondered, why not an operating system for people?

In training sessions conducted over 13 weeks, everybody at Excell was taken through the eight core values, a list comprised of guidelines like "Treat others with uncompromising truth" and "Lavish trust on your associates" and "Don't touch dishonest dollars."

Meanwhile, Pacheco says, "we also defined what Excell's unique business value is: We solve problems." At the end of that first module, every employee was issued a "driver's license," a laminated, wallet-sized card with the people values on one side and the company's core business value-- "We solve problems"--on the other.

The company plans to work with Lebow on two more training modules that will complete the construction of its Heroic Environment. The whole process, Pacheco insists, has helped meld a hodgepodge of smart people from wildly different company backgrounds--IBM, DEC, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft--and whiz kids who haven't grown up in a culture that makes their behavior consistent, trustworthy, and bankable. "We'd never have found common ground on our own," Pacheco believes. "When your business is exploding, you never have enough time." -- N.K.A.

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