Extreme Managing

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Hartnett knows what he's after: those who fidget or fail to make eye contact lose points. Ditto for prospective managers with severe money problems. He's less interested in what candidates say than in how they say it; if they're uncomfortable with his prying at this stage, there can be little question about how they'll feel about calling him to make a late-night confession. "I want them to understand this is not a job to me. This is a lifetime of working together," Hartnett says. "I want partners who are going to die with me."

On a cool morning in March, Hartnett arrived unannounced at the Sonic in Quinlan, Tex. (population 1,360). It was 8:30, and manager Gilbert Alvarez was nowhere to be found. "Can you get Gilbert on the phone?" Hartnett instructed an employee. "Go ahead and wake him up." Minutes later a harried Alvarez arrived. Hartnett looked at his watch and then glared at Alvarez. "What is this? Banker hours?" Hartnett asked, apparently unaware that Alvarez was actually early. For the next 20 minutes, Hartnett and Alvarez toured the drive-in, with Hartnett providing a running commentary: "Are we going out of business or are we going to repaint those lamps?" he asked. "This tree here dies a little bit every year. Maybe we're going to have to take it down," he said. "What's Debbie making, $6.25 an hour? Well, maybe it's time you started thinking about a raise."

The meaning was clear: Alvarez would repaint the lamps, mind the trees, boost Debbie's paycheck, and do whatever else Hartnett had mentioned. Hartnett didn't have to raise his voice to strike fear in Alvarez's heart. Not that Alvarez is scared of Hartnett--anymore. "I used to feel a little shaky and nervous when Jack dropped in," Alvarez admits.

Hartnett rises from his desk several times a month to pop in on some of his stores. He wants to keep everybody slightly off balance so people will work even harder, lest they unleash his Texas-sized toughness. Once, during a dispute with a manager, Hartnett even hurled boxes of frozen hamburger meat against the wall in anger. "We went eyeball-to-eyeball, or in our case belly-to-belly," recalls supervisor Jim Simons. Do Hartnett's bidding, and he'll be "the nicest man in the whole world," as Hartnett himself puts it. But wrong him, he warns, and "I'll go after your jugular vein, and I'll get it. I'm very Old Testament."

So Old Testament is he, in fact, that he has his own version of the Ten Commandments--granted, there are only eight of them. Hartnett requires new hires to adhere to them. He will fire anyone who breaks the same commandment twice. Behind his guidelines lurks another of his harsh but simple principles: the best way to foster a company culture of openness, integrity, and honesty is to demand one. Unlike the original commandments, Hartnett's version--which includes "I don't steal from you" as the first commandment and "You don't steal from me" as the second--communicates a sense of impatience. Take the eighth commandment, for instance: "I will only tell you one time." Not that Hartnett is deaf to employee suggestions. The installation of larger grills and the computerization of company stores came at the initiative of managers and supervisors, who lobbied hard to sway him. Still he spins out the big ideas, which range from the addition of an ice-cream menu to the introduction of children's playgrounds and--in some spots--even volleyball courts.

Those with the impetuousness to implement their own ideas--without his blessing--suffer. In 1996 a Texas manager who took it upon himself to computerize his store and take Saturday nights off was passed over for a promotion to supervisor, even though he ran the most profitable store in the chain. "Jack wants you to do things exactly the way he tells you," says the manager, who eventually quit in frustration. As Hartnett sees it, the manager behaved in a way he simply couldn't abide: the guy wasn't a team player. "We have a success formula that works," Hartnett says.

That rationale also explains Hartnett's broader ability to see complicated management issues in black-and-white terms. Although Sonic operates in a competitive industry (see "Sonic's Boom," below), D.L. Rogers is merely a master franchisee, forking over an average of 3% of each store's monthly revenues to Sonic headquarters, in Oklahoma City. Hartnett owns as much as 15% of several Sonic drive-ins and also receives a salary and a 5% bonus that is based on net profits. It's not up to him alone to map out the issues of grand strategy--the pace of technology, the whims of the marketplace--that tend to leave most company builders convinced that their own brainpower can carry them only so far.

Hartnett stays focused on running the drive-ins, where he's sure he knows exactly what needs to be done. "We can teach you to make money if you do it the way we tell you to do it," he says. Remember, he'll tell you only one time.

Like most exemplary entrepreneurial leaders--Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines, for example, and Mary Kay Ash, founder of the cosmetics empire--Jack Hartnett isn't just running a company. He's filling a void. "The better business leaders understand that employees are coming to their jobs looking for a sense of community, family, spiritual fulfillment, and a place to develop themselves," observes Jay Conger, professor of management at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business.

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