Like this year's Agenda issue, the April:May 1998 issue of Fast Company featured a report on the people, teams, and companies that are creating the future of business. Last year's role models were as follows:
Steve Miller of Royal Dutch/Shell, whose approach to grassroots leadership offers a powerful model for others to follow -- by showing that commitment and creativity come from all parts and from all levels of an organization.
David Duffield of PeopleSoft Inc., who (along with Steve Zarate) shows how humane technology can generate huge productivity gains -- and let loose the unbridled human spirit.
Al West of SEI Investments, a pioneer in total teamwork who heads an organization that has much to teach about becoming a take-no-prisoners competitor through one-for-all, all-for-one collaboration.
Ray Anderson of Interface Inc., whose commitment to sustainable growth demonstrates the zero-waste practices that every company can use to merge economic growth with social responsibility. Here's an update on the progress of these four Agenda setters.
Is Steve Miller, group managing director of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies, worried that recent mega-mergers in the oil industry (BP joins forces with Amoco; Exxon and Mobil create a new global giant) will challenge his company's leadership position?
Hardly. "If anything," Miller says, "all of this merger activity has made grassroots leadership an even greater imperative. We want to create hundreds of small, entrepreneurial businesses that come together to make one big business. Grassroots leadership lets you break down a massive company into a series of bite-size, manageable, highly effective pieces."
Miller's basic argument: Enduring growth doesn't come from cutting deals in the executive suite; it comes from the ground up. His secret weapon: a series of "retailing boot camps" in which frontline employees work together to develop products, to share ideas, and to foster continued innovation. A recent study of these boot camps estimated that they have added more than $300 million to the company's bottom line since 1996. But the real value of these camps, Miller says, lies in the way that people at Royal Dutch/Shell are now able to create learning opportunities on their own.
"We're scrambling to keep up with the phenomenal rate of learning around here," he says. "It's as if, in the first year, people weren't sure how to add and subtract -- and now, a year later, they've already licked calculus. So we're trying to figure out how to create a grassroots-leadership graduate school. In other words, how do you get your doctorate in this stuff?"
Every high-flying software company hits turbulence at some point. Today PeopleSoft Inc. finds itself traveling through stormy weather. Its stock, which was trading at more than $50 per share last April, has recently been trading as low as $22 per share. Also within the past year, the company announced its first layoff (430 employees, or 6% of the workforce). The causes of all this turbulence: stiff competition, slow revenue growth, and fears that the Y2K problem may lead customers to postpone their automation plans.
What is PeopleSoft relying on to power its comeback strategy? On the power of the PeopleBorg. That's the nickname that CIO Steve Zarate has given to the digital infrastructure that links the company's 4,000 people. The term, which Zarate borrowed from "Star Trek," refers to a global network of laptops, shared applications, email exchanges, and intranet conversations.
The way to ramp up growth, argues Zarate, is to ramp up the power of the PeopleBorg. "Sure, it's been a tough year," says Zarate. "But you can't grow by 100% per year forever. We have to embrace innovative tools that lower costs, increase productivity, and help us grow." And, he adds, it is precisely during tough times like these that the company's commitment to "infomocracy" becomes most valuable: "Everyone should know everything -- both good news and bad news." Here's hoping that 1999 brings PeopleSoft more of the former and less of the latter.
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