Rocky Mountain High

On a clear day, you can just make out the skyline from the back porch of Denny Ferrera's house in Louisville, Colorado. Not the skyscrapers of Denver, but the outlines of the industrial buildings at Rocky Flats, the former nuclear-weapons plant located just 16 miles outside the city. By the end of 2006, however -- if not before -- that entire skyline will be gone. And Ferrera hopes to be there to close the gates.

For Ferrera, Rocky Flats is very much a family affair. He has spent almost 30 years working at the facility, which is nearing the end of a cleanup process that began several years after it ceased production in 1989. He joined as a plutonium engineer; his current task is managing the teardown of all the "cold," or non-nuclear, buildings at the plant. Ferrera's twin brother, Kenny, a decontamination manager, has worked here for 30 years, too. Their father, Dominic, who still wears blue denim Dickies 20 years after retiring, started at the plant in 1953, a year after it opened. Denny's wife works in accounting here, his sister-in-law works in shipping, and his nephew Gary is a firefighter. Even Denny's two sons work at Rocky Flats. One is an engineer, the other demolishes site buildings, including one Nightline once called the "most dangerous building in America."

And all of them are working their way out of their jobs. "How in the world do you get people to work as fast as they can to put themselves out of work?" asks Kim Cameron, a University of Michigan business-school professor, who has been studying the successes at Rocky Flats. "Well, incentive is one [way], meaning is one, symbolic leadership is one, and changing the nature of the culture is one."

Kaiser-Hill, the company running the cleanup (a joint venture between two engineering firms), has done all of these things and more to turn around a toxic employee culture and try to achieve its audacious plan. Initial estimates pegged the cleanup at 70 years and $36 billion, but Kaiser-Hill embraced a goal to complete it in about 10 years and for less than $7 billion. If the cleanup of Rocky Flats continues apace, the facility, long seen by employees as a place of cradle-to-grave employment, will cease to exist in less than two years.

Although the dismantling of Rocky Flats is vastly more complex and dangerous than, say, launching a new flavor of popcorn or chasing the next consulting gig, Kaiser-Hill's goals are something ambitious, innovative companies try to achieve every day: to capitalize on an opportunity in a new market by doing something they've never done before. To succeed, the company had to persuade employees to strive for seemingly impossible results, to stretch themselves in ways not thought possible, and to develop new procedures for working faster, safer, and smarter. For any company facing daunting circumstances, Kaiser-Hill's experience offers some unusual lessons in managing with flexibility, sensitivity, and imagination.

For a long time, Kaiser-Hill's goal seemed to many -- not least of all the workers at Rocky Flats -- as incredible as the end of the Cold War itself. Many of the site's employees were proud Cold Warriors who had worked at the site making plutonium-based triggers for nuclear bombs -- until an infamous 1989 FBI raid shut the place down. "[Workers] went overnight from being heroes to goats," says Nancy Tuor, Kaiser-Hill's CEO. Workers suffered from inertia, and the ranks were filled with rampant denial that cleaning up the site in such a short period was even possible. (Critics, including some employees, have charged that the company has shortchanged safety to speed up the cleanup.)

Even Kaiser-Hill had doubts that the monumental task could be completed on schedule. Indeed, as recently as late 2000, Kaiser-Hill gave the project only a 15% chance of completion by 2006. But by last August, the last of the weapons-usable plutonium was shipped off the site, and today, the company says the project is about 80% complete. The site is being handed over to the Fish and Wildlife Service to become a wildlife refuge.

How the company has gotten this far involves an array of factors -- the Department of Energy, local governments, and other regulators have all played a role -- but one of the biggest is how it has gotten employees to buy in. It has needed them to fulfill its own ambitions. The company stands to earn as much as $560 million if it completes the cleanup by the end of 2005 for a total cost of $6.1 billion. And with the success of Rocky Flats, one of Kaiser-Hill's parents, CH2M Hill, is poised to compete for remaining nuclear-cleanup contracts in the United States and the UK. "I think it's great," says Ferrera, who hopes to latch onto one of the company's new assignments. "Not great to work myself out of a job, but it's great to be able to say I've been there through production and I was here to see the closure of the site."