Rodgers’s main strategy for minimizing corporate politics at Cypress is an extraordinary policy of openness and deliberation. Essentially all information about every aspect of company operations is available to essentially every employee at all times. If a shipping clerk wants to see how up to date or behind his supervisor, or his supervisor’s supervisor, or even the chief executive, Rodgers himself, is with respect to his schedule of goals, he can access the person’s file with a few strokes of the keyboard, no questions asked. As a result, there are few secrets, and correspondingly few opportunities for people to empower themselves at the expense of their fellow workers.
More important, the key management decisions to authorize new capital spending and new positions are made in a weekly meeting at which all managers are present, every request competes with every other request, and no request for money or personnel is granted unless the unit involved–and, in general, the company as a whole–has had a record of increasing its output per employee. The meetings are naturally contentious, but they get all the issues out on the table, guarantee that a consistent set of standards is applied across the board, make favoritism and inside deals difficult, and impress on everyone the absolute necessity of constantly increasing productivity. Rodgers reports that when he (mistakenly, he now believes) suspended the committee for almost a year, when profits and productivity were off and new spending and hires were on hold, hallway politicking for special dispensations from the CEO picked up dramatically–and that without the presence of other managers and competing information, he found himself hard pressed to say no to special pleading. When regular capital-and-headcount meetings resumed, the politics subsided.
Most ambitious of Rodgers’s anti-politics strategies is Cypress’s effort to turn itself into a confederation of largely autonomous entrepreneurial firms. At a certain point in its growth, Rodgers concluded that Cypress was beginning to fall prey to the bureaucratic tendencies that afflict big companies everywhere and decided to generate future corporate growth through substantially free-standing startup enterprises, undertaken either by talented employees or by ambitious newcomers. The company would provide venture capital, have a seat or two on the board, and exclusive rights to the product, which would go into Cypress’s catalogue. The entrepreneurs would be entitled to the normal founders’ rewards if the venture was successful. Rodgers reports that once the managers of his big Texas fate became equity owners of the facility they ran, their demands for capital and headcount fell sharply and they found ways to do more with less.
Rodgers evinces an ability unusual in a CEO– or any American these days–to admit mistakes. For example, a passage about Cypress’s killer software casually acknowledges that, at the time it was being written, the CEO’s own computer had shut itself down because a number of T. J.’s own tasks had fallen unacceptably behind schedule.
There’s nothing wussy or self-abnegating about this–T.J., it’s clear, has about as
much ambition and ego as it’s possible to fit in a normal human psyche, and he obviously hates to be less than perfect at anything. But, on the evidence of this book, at least, when he screws up, he does admit it. As he told some new employees in Minnesota in a briefing on the Cypress culture, "We make no excuses when things go wrong" and "success does not go to our heads."
As much as any system, it’s this willingness to subordinate even the CEO’s own ego and convenience to the same rules and goals he sets for everyone else that accounts for the importance of this book and differentiates it from what Hammer and Champy have written. The problem of the big corporation today is, in the end, a problem of the disjunction–intellectual, psychological, and moral–between company interests and individual interests. Hammer and Champy scarcely recognize the problem, let alone offer a solution.
Rodgers sees the problem with crystal clarity, and if he doesn’t have the entire answer to it, he certainly puts his finger on a big part of it. Rodgers shows that realism in the conduct of a business depends ultimately on the participants’ capacity for idealism–for sacrificing present pleasures for the sake of future furfillments, for avoiding narcissistic politics and perks, and channeling personal pride and ambition to achieve corporate success. Not a new lesson, to be sure, but one that a lot of supposedly sophisticated people these days evidently need to study again.
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