In Search of the New World (of Work)

By keeping what worked and eliminating what didn't, they would allow a new organization to emerge. "Let's let the people in the organization find the weaknesses in the organization," Bauer told his fellow managers. "Let's let things grow from the bottom up."

The rules were few but firm. People would attack the service issue in teams, because customer-service problems cut across multiple departments, and only cross-functional collaboration would allow people to analyze those problems from start to finish. Another rule involved cutting waste: The headquarters was rife with duplication and full of processes that slowed down service and drove up costs. Yet another rule involved the eradication of sacred cows: Every job, every procedure was fair game for change.

The next rule was the clincher: No fear.

Bauer knew that he needed to tap the deepest, wildest creativity of everyone at MBCC. But the employees were used to an organization that had discouraged risk -- where planning was supreme and mistakes were to be avoided at all costs. Only by breaking down fear, only by encouraging experimentation, risk, and sheer play, could Bauer hope to attain the near-impossible. "The future is all about risk taking," he says. "You can't be a faster organization if people aren't taking risks. It's not good enough just to say, 'We encourage risk.' Leaders throughout the organization have to support people who take risks and make mistakes. If the leaders don't do that, you're only halfway there. You have to have a fear-free environment."

The no-fear principle also involved a promise from Bauer: Despite his eagerness to cut costs, he would not lay anyone off -- no matter how many new efficiencies were introduced. It was an easy promise to make. For one thing, Bauer wanted the company to undergo dramatic growth, and he foresaw that such growth would create advancement opportunities in new areas. For another, he recognized that no one knew better how to find waste than the people who had helped to create it. Thus, people who found ways to eliminate their own jobs would be rewarded with new positions. Bauer wanted people to be playing in a safe sandbox.

One team threw itself into writing a mission statement for the new organization, spending months on the task and drawing more than 200 employees into the process. Mission statements hang on lobby walls all over corporate America. Usually they're stuck in a wood frame or etched into a brass plate. And usually they're full of insipid platitudes that inspire employees to do precisely nothing. Nobody buys into a mission statement unless it has an edge, unless it's slightly dangerous -- which the MBCC statement certainly was.

"We encourage a restless spirit of inquiry," the statement reads. "Free-flowing communication is the lifeblood of our organization, an information-rich environment where communications flow freely and in all directions." In other words: no management secrets, no confidential numbers, no hidden agendas. Everyone, the document pointedly notes, has the right "to speak frankly without fear of reprisal." It goes on: "We must accept and embrace risk-taking at Mercedes-Benz Credit Corporation."

The mission statement, in turn, helped guide teams as they figured out ways to alter the company's day-to-day operations. Ultimately 19 teams organized themselves around various initiatives. Computers were installed on desktops (where few had existed before) and then lashed together with email systems, so that team members could continually volley ideas. The entire office was transformed physically: To reflect the company's new values, Bauer opened up office space, tore down walls, and lowered cubicle partitions. In the Norwalk facility, he built 10 new conference rooms and encased them in glass so that everyone would always be able to see who was meeting with whom.

By 1996, the basic outlines of a new organization were in place. Four of the company's eight layers of management had been wiped out. Executive names were peeled off the plumb parking spots. Every employee became eligible for a leased Mercedes-Benz. New bonus programs compensated people not only for individual performance but also for the performance of their teams and for the output of the entire company. MBCC expanded boss-to-subordinate performance reviews to include the views of both fellow teammates and members of other teams. It instituted a gain-sharing program that paid teams bonuses equal to 10% of the value of any cost-saving measures that they had identified. Employees stripped the Norwalk office of its "corporate headquarters" designation and gave it a name that emphasized collaboration rather than control: the North American Support Center. In the building's lobby, they installed a glistening, rotating, avant-garde Mobius strip, which they chose because the look of it -- like the look of their organization -- seemed to change continuously.