Centennials by Professor Alex Hill

Author:Professor Alex Hill [Hill, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529159172
Publisher: Cornerstone
Published: 2023-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

5.

One organisation that understands these dynamics and has made them an integral part of its structure is Gore, founded in 1958 by a chemical engineer who had seen for himself what happens when you ignore the natural rules that govern human groups. Before he started his own company, Bill Gore had worked for DuPont for sixteen years. During that time he had become increasingly dissatisfied. The company he had joined was a creative family business. The company he was working for a decade and a half later was on its way to becoming a corporate giant. The transition had been accompanied by a huge growth in sales and an accompanying mushrooming of the workforce from 30,000 when Gore started to 90,000 fifteen years later.32 Gore worried that in the process the company had lost its creative edge, that it had become distracted by the challenges of managing what it had rather than revelling in the possibilities of what it might do in the future, and that it was in danger of losing control. The products it had pioneered and that had made it great – neoprene, dynamite, paint and cellophane – were no longer cutting-edge. It hadn’t launched anything new in over a decade. And it was resisting Gore’s proposal to find new uses for PTFE, the polymer the business had developed twenty years earlier. It just wanted to make money from what it had.

So Gore left.

Over the next three years, working with his wife and son in the basement of their home, he developed all sorts of products that might profitably make use of PTFE – from communication cords, to computer cables, to electric wires. In 1960, the family team secured their first big order, from Denver Water, for seven miles of computer cabling. They built their first factory later that year, and were awarded their first patent in 1963.33

Gore knew they had to grow if they were to survive. But he also knew he didn’t want to create another DuPont behemoth. And it was then that he came across a book that transformed his life. Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise posits two approaches to management. Theory X is based on the assumption that people are lazy, unengaged and motivated only by money and so argues that they need to be commanded, controlled and incentivised. Theory Y holds that people are motivated, curious and keen to do meaningful work and therefore believes that, to do their best work, they simply need to be nurtured, encouraged and recognised.34

Gore rejected Theory X. He decided that he would expand his business along the principles of Theory Y. Such an approach, he came to believe, offered the best chance of avoiding the problems he had noted at DuPont. It would also create an environment in which people would work on problems they wanted to solve with like-minded colleagues, and would come up with fresh and innovative ideas accordingly. ‘He created a place with hardly any hierarchy and few ranks and titles,’ journalist Alan Deutschman wrote.

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