The bureaucracy paradox

- What makes busting bureaucracy difficult is that in many way bureaucracy works. It does give us control and focus and discipline and alignment. And if you really think about it, at the heart of all of this is a fundamental paradox, the paradox between control and freedom. If you want an organization that's more adaptable and more innovative, and more engaging, people need freedom. They need freedom to try new things, to take risks, to color outside of the lines, to go around channels, but yet our organizations need a lot of control. They need to deliver five nines reliability to deliver on customer promises, to make those quarterly numbers. So the challenge for anyone hacking management is to understand how do you transcend those old trade offs? How do you have high levels of freedom and control? So where is there a way of getting both, and I think there is. Let me give an example. W.L. Gore has been called the most innovative company in the world, it has 10,000 employees, about $3 billion in revenue and it makes products that you would know, like Gore-Tex fabrics as well as membranes and fuel cells, the fabric that goes into space suits, and they have $1 billion business in medical devices. Interestingly at Gore, every team chooses their own leaders. In fact, when I interviewed their CEO, they do have a CEO, Terry Kelly. She said the most difficult thing a leader has to learn at Gore is that you can never give an order. If you tell people what to do, they simply won't follow you. They'll unchoose you. So imagine a $3 billion company where everyone, every team chooses who they want to lead them. I can see the freedom there, but where's the discipline. Well, let me give you just one example. At the end of every year at Gore, every employee gets a list of names. These are the colleagues with which you work. It could be 25 or 30 names and you're asked to rank all those individuals from one to 30, let's say, based on how much value they added to the business that year. There's none of this usual HR nonsense of the five dimensions and the scale and everybody gets a four-point due, no you're adults, you know what drives business value, rate your colleague. They take all those ratings, they put that on a bell shaped curve, and that's also your compensation. So if a team asks you to lead them and you discover you're number seven out of that ranking at the end of the year, you know your leadership capital is eroding and you better go figure out why. But think about the discipline that brings to the organization. One of the core values at Gore is that everyone has the right to say no to any request. So you might come and say, "Gary, will you help me "on this new product campaign," I will say, "No, I'm too busy, I don't have the time." But before I say that, I'll think about the fact that at the end of the year my peers are going to evaluate me and it's my peers who are going to set my salary. So I'm probably more inclined to say yes. So that's discipline, discipline and accountability to my peers. That also turns every single team member into an entrepreneur. I don't have a boss where I'm negotiating my KPIs and my goals, so I'm thinking throughout the whole year what else do I do to become more valuable to the organization, to my colleagues. Do I need to learn something new, go on a new course, do I need to work on a different project? So there's enormous collegiality and enormous entrepreneurship, personal discipline even though it seems like you're in an organization where people can choose their own paths and choose their own boss. So control and freedom are not mutually exclusive, but to transcend those old familiar trade offs, we have to think much more creatively than we've done about how we deliver those old benefits of consistency and control in fundamentally new ways.