"I'm also careful not to talk about what I think about a client, whether they're good or bad to work with, that kind of thing. Quite often during this process, especially during construction when things are running late, you can get angry or hurt or think someone is being unreasonable. And you say things, and they get back to the client, and that can ruin the relationship. Eighty or ninety percent of my clients are people I've done business with for 10 or 20 years. And I think the reason I have those long-term relationships is that I respect our clients. That means not talking out of school."
Company Secrets
Keep intellectual property secure
Manny Ontiveros
Manager of Web services and information-systems training
Sandia National Laboratories
Albuquerque
Sandia is a giant R&D lab on a military base, operated by Lockheed Martin. It does classified work for the departments of Energy and Defense, and frequently works with private-sector companies and occasionally even with foreign governments. It has an elaborate system of Web sites meant to encourage information sharing both internally and externally.
"People use our external Web site to solicit partnerships from industry. They'll put up a home page that describes what their program does--create efficient solar cells, for example--and some of the program's accomplishments and research results. They want to put up enough information so that companies that sell solar-power systems, for example, or even foreign governments that want to deliver power to remote regions of their countries, might want to establish relationships with them. But we always have patent agents review the information before it's published. The agents determine whether we're actually giving away intellectual property by describing in too much detail a process that we have invented, and they then adjust the content accordingly. We don't want a competitor or a foreign government to get enough information that they could file the patent first.
"We certainly have issues relative to classified information, since the bulk of our work is related to nuclear weapons. So we have a strong program internally based on need to know. Our computer-security folks regularly conduct training for all of us so that we know what the different categories of information are, who you can and cannot release information to, what the processes for releasing it are, and so forth. Also, each of the major program groups has the equivalent of an information officer who oversees information release and minimizes the risk of someone releasing information inappropriately.
"The use of electronic-mail systems continues to be an issue as well. E-mails can contain tidbits of sensitive information that are innocuous in themselves but that could be pieced together into something pretty interesting. We want to be sure that someone conducting an electronic conversation over time with a university colleague, say, doesn't over-share without meaning to."
Company Secrets
Share it all with employees, soup to nuts
Ron Ferner
Former vice-president of low-cost business systems
Campbell's Soup Co.,
Camden, N.J.
When Ron Ferner first joined Campbell's Soup, in the 1960s, none of the company's executives believed in sharing any kind of information with anybody. By the time he retired, in 1996, Ferner and his colleagues had started sharing everything--goals, financials, product news--with employees.
"At first I was very skeptical about sharing information with employees, but now I'm a believer. I saw the power of the thing. But we always drew the line at salaries. And if we had a supersecret project that we were not sure we would actually launch, we may not have told. But everything else was fair game. Even with the hourly employees that ran the filling machines, putting soup in the cans, we shared the financials.
"At one point Campbell's had a philosophy of meeting with all employees every quarter. I had 1,800 people in my plant. It took three days to hold the meetings. It was quite a chore, but worth it. The employees got very comfortable. It was a real change from the old days, when we would stand behind a post and peek out to watch them work.
"That approach doesn't work overnight. If you don't talk to employees for 10 years and then show up and say that today we start talking, you'll be really disappointed. You have to pick where to draw the line very carefully. You're building trust and don't want to backtrack. It took us years to talk to employees and make them comfortable. Once they were, we started getting their ideas and finding out what the real problems were. A lot of things amazed us.
"One time a packaging team in Sacramento was having problems with boxes breaking. Some of us managers started talking to them about what the problems were and realized they really had a good handle on what was wrong. So we said, 'Why don't you guys call the supplier?' Then we called the supplier to tell them they would be hearing from our crew, and they said, 'Why not have them talk directly to our hourly employees?'
"If the managers alone had tried to solve this problem, it would have gone on forever. Instead, we rented a van, sent our people over, and solved the whole thing. Afterward, we had a party. It gave the workers great confidence. That never would have happened in the days when Campbell's had a policy of not telling anybody anything that wasn't written down for them."
