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Pastimes : ISOMAN AND HIS CAVE OF SOLITUDE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DSPetry who wrote (107)	1/21/1999 9:45:00 AM
From: ISOMAN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 539

Trucks and Trust "Preston was just like all the other trucking companies," Sales Vice-President Paul Sims told us. "Management knew all the answers. If there was a question, management would make the judgment. No matter that the manager had seven years' experience, and the driver had 20. The feeling was, 'I am the manager. I have the title.' When a guy didn't have the right attitude, I would give him workloads to straighten him out." Then in 1978, Will Potter arrived as CEO of Preston, the Maryland-based company. Potter announced to management - and the drivers - that management was the problem. Paul Sims was then an assistant manager in the Canton, Ohio, terminal. He admits he thought Potter "was nuts," but he decided to hang around and give the new approach a try. (A lot of other managers bailed out.) After a seminar on "performance management," for example, Sims bought an easel and started posting how productive we were - posting revenues and load averages. He was taken aback when drivers immediately started asking questions. "I'd show them their productivity for the day, and I'd draw a star or use a sticker when they did a good job," he recalls. "I saw these grown guys getting excited about this. If I got real busy in the morning and didn't put the figures up, the guys would come over to me and say, 'Sims! Put those figures up!'" All the involvement nearly wore Sims out. It got to the point where he was coming in at four in the morning and leaving at six at night, exhausted. "So one day, I had three keys made to the terminal," he continued. "The morning shift came in, and I put the keys down on the table. 'What's that for?' they asked. "So that you can unlock the door in the morning," I said. "What? You aren't going to be here?" I said, "No, I can't keep coming in at 4:00 a.m. You guys work 4:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., but I have to stay until six - and it's killing me." And they asked, "What if we have a problem?" "Solve it," I said. "What if we can't?" "I said, Here's my number at home; call and wake me up." "You trust us?" "I wouldn't have made these keys if I didn't," I said. "They couldn't believe it." By Tom Peters