In Search of the New World (of Work)

Indeed, the principal outcome of the change process was to ensure that the operation would never stop changing, particularly as market conditions shifted. Margaret Brayden, for example, who had spent years as the company's records-retention coordinator, came up with new processes that effectively eliminated her own job. After she stepped down to become group leader of office services, she continued to cut costs, ultimately wiping out her entire department. Her direct reports were all reassigned, and Brayden herself was rewarded with an assignment on a change-management team. (Bauer, for his part, recently moved on to become head of worldwide financing operations outside North America for the newly created Daimler-Chrysler AG.)

By 1998, the firm had swelled its assets to $23 billion, and MBCC had been ranked at or near the top of its industry in several major customer-satisfaction surveys. Thanks to the constant experimentation of Bauer's employees, the organization had diversified into the financing of aircraft, boats, and other products. His employees had also instituted real-time financing services, in which a car buyer can apply for financing, receive a credit approval, and drive away with a car in the span of a few minutes. "That sort of thing is possible only when people stretch," Bauer says, "only when they're willing to step out of their key functions and step into uncertainty."

Thomas Petzinger Jr. (tom@petzinger.com) writes a column, "The Front Lines," for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Oil & Honor: The Texaco-Pennzoil Wars (Putnam, 1987), Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits that Plunged the Airlines into Chaos (Times Books, 1995), and, most recently, The New Pioneers: the Men and Women Who are Transforming the Workplace and Marketplace (Simon & Schuster, 1999), from which this article is drawn.

Copyright © 1999 by Thomas Petzinger Jr. From the forthcoming book The New Pioneers, by Thomas Petzinger Jr., to be published by Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed by permission.