The Power of Listening

Tweet

From then until 1993 or so, those clever young M.B.A.'s got a taste of what Jim Fox must have felt as he hit the mat.

The first problem was simply inexperience, compounded by boneheadedness. "We were acting like investment bankers," says Paul with a shrug. "We weren't watching costs. It was out of control." Then came the workout group and a plan to rescue the company from its near bankruptcy, which the brothers somehow managed to pull off. By 1992 they had two small acquisitions under their belts and were ready to buy a larger plant -- the one that the company now occupies -- from a big player named MacMillan Bloedel (which is now part of Weyerhaeuser). After they did, those earlier problems looked trivial. The new employees they hired to replace departing workers didn't have a clue as to what they were doing. Nobody could work the new information system. Just as things were turning around, a pounding snowstorm shut down the local economy for three weeks. Six months later, the paper market tightened. Suddenly, nobody wanted to sell paper to an upstart little company with a lousy credit rating. Peter and Paul "put on the kneepads" and went begging for paper, eventually finding a supplier in Puerto Rico. For a while, it was touch and go. Paul Snider, a customer-service rep for Atlas both then and now, remembers a stark time: "Every night we walked out of here, we were discussing whether we were coming back the next day."

But most nightmares come to an end, and when the Centenaris woke up from this bad dream, they realized that not only had they survived, they could even catch a glimpse of prosperity. In a year or two, they were growing again. Better yet, they were beginning to make consistent money.

Sometime after that awakening, in 1995 or so, the new dream began to emerge. Hey, they told each other, this is fun. Forget selling out. Let's build a big company, one that keeps acquiring competitors, just the way we've been doing, and keeps on swiping market share from the stodgy inhabitants of this low-rent industry. Figure on 20% annual growth for 10 or 20 years, the brothers realized, and you eventually wind up with some very large numbers on the top line. "Billion-dollar business" began to be a phrase that you heard around Atlas.

Then there was that idea of building a different company, one founded on what the Centenaris liked to feel was their basic philosophy of business -- namely, that you should treat employees like human beings rather than like interchangeable parts. In cultural terms, Atlas would be Southwest Airlines, a hotbed of enthusiasm and cooperation in an industry characterized by lethargy or contention on the shop floor. "We believed that people should have stock," says Peter. "They should have ownership. And we thought if we were going to sell people stock, they'd have to have education." They'd also have to have access to all the financials -- open books. Maybe they should even have a voice in the decisions that affect their lives.

It wasn't as if they absolutely had to change their culture; the company was already turned around, and the Centenaris could have gone on their merry way with conventional managerial ideas. In fact, when a consultant, over lunch in a delicatessen across from the plant, first broached the idea of opening Atlas's books, Paul nearly gagged. ("'You gotta be kidding me.' That was my word-for-word reaction," he confesses.) But he did read the guide to open-book management that the consultant recommended. Paul talked things over with Peter. They read more books. One of them was the mid-1990s hit Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler, in which the author, a Brazilian CEO, describes running a democratic, open-book company in which people set their own salaries. Before too long, they were sold. We gotta do this, the brothers said. "The whole idea -- it was not only challenging, it was exhilarating," Paul says now. "We also looked at it as a strategy to help us achieve our goals, to build this thing and become a major force. It made the business much more interesting, much more exciting."

What is this company -- this force -- today, eight years later? As a business, Atlas is undoubtedly successful, its sales up from $5.8 million in 1990 to $45 million in 2000 and an estimated $69 million in 2002, its net profit positive every year for nearly a decade. Not too shabby for a manufacturing company in major growth mode. And is it truly a different kind of company? Well, you wouldn't want to exaggerate. The work on the shop floor, as in any box company, is hard, blistering hot in summertime, and occasionally dangerous (the number of lost-time accidents last year: five). People screw up, the way people do everywhere. (A major accounting error last summer forced the company to take big write-offs in the fourth quarter, eating into profits.) Still, what you see in the old plant outside Baltimore really is different from most other companies, on at least three counts. And what you get from those differences is a bunch of reasons to think that, like Southwest, Atlas Container may indeed be capable of growing and growing and growing some more, just as the Centenari brothers are imagining.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: