I once enjoyed a lengthy conversation with the legendary Bill Veeck. Baseball fans will recall Veeck as the colorful, outspoken and innovative owner of several baseball teams, most notably the Chicago White Sox. But as a young man he also planted the ivy that now greens the outfield wall at Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, and he supervised construction of Wrigley Field’s historic, manually operated scoreboard, still in use today.
A World War II veteran, Veeck had been standing in the wrong place when an artillery piece backfired and crushed his leg. His foot had to be amputated, and then eventually most of his leg was taken, too. Perhaps because of that experience, he always had a special feel for the underdog. And because of that, he was forever going out of his way to spend time talking with Everyman. Bill Veeck was a man who knew the pulse of people.
At the time of our conversation, Veeck owned the White Sox, who had just finished a successful year. Veeck wanted me to know he was grateful for all the fans who supported the South Side team. He promised that the Sox would go all the way next year. They would bring home a pennant, he predicted, and maybe even win the World Series.
But that afternoon he wanted to talk not about baseball, but about something else altogether. Always a maverick, he was preoccupied with a cultural problem. He was worried about bigness, about the loss of identity, about the impersonal distance between individuals and institutions throughout the land.
Ever a mischief-maker, he suggested that people should rebel. He was urging anyone who would listen to protest in ways little and large. Black out account numbers on forms you returned, he recommended. Insist on being known by your name. He even suggested that people should fill out every magazine subscription card with the name of Chris Columbus and the address of his statue in Grant Park, just to force publishers to mail magazines to nowhere.
Most of the work I do is for big companies, whose very bigness is part of the problem they face. It creates distance between customers and the companies, and it creates distance between the executives who run these companies and the workers who actually create value for customers.
That distance erodes the substance and richness of information and insight that one person can transfer to another person and vice versa. Thus people throughout these large companies make and execute policy without the benefit of full knowledge and wisdom of their own circumstances and challenges. As one wit shrewdly observed: “If only we knew what we know!”
Of course, there are solutions, and they can save many times the cost of their implementation. But identifying the situations and bringing the resources to bear on those situations requires a little leap of faith. Especially in times like these, that leap may be the difference between growth and stagnation, perhaps even between survival and collapse.
Bill Veeck took many such leaps during his long and glorious career, and they paid off magnificently. He was able to take those leaps precisely because he refused to wile away his days in an office. He was always out and about, walking on one leg and talking with the people who could and would support his teams. Because he was constantly reaching out to people, he knew their dreams and frustrations, and he had a pretty good sense for what would work in the end.
The moral to this story, apropos to every leader, is that an open door is never enough. You can never count on others to take the first step toward dynamic, candid communication. You must get out there and do it yourself. And once you find someone who will muster the moxie to speak truth to you, have the wisdom and the courage to be quiet and listen.
The bigger your organization, the more difficult that is. And the bigger your organization, the more important it is, too.
Thomas Lee has been benchmarking best-practice companies in organizational communication for almost 15 years. To date he has personally benchmarked almost 30 leading American corporations, including 3M, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Weyerhaeuser, Levi-Strauss, McDonald’s, Shell Exploration, Duke Energy, and many others.
