Page 44 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

Make Everyone’s Dreams Come True 25

something in the design phase, it costs you 10 dollars. If you change some-
thing after the plant is built, it costs you a hundred dollars.” A Dream Retreat
increases the opportunities for figuring out what’s needed early in the process,
before you spend a lot of change for the change.
In 1993, before Mead Johnson Nutritional division began constructing
the world’s largest production facility for infant-formula powder in Zeeland,
Michigan, Hartke brought his diverse construction team together for a Dream
Retreat at a hotel in Holland, Michigan. The team members, both workers
and suppliers, “really got to know one another there,” Hartke says. “They put
together plans through formal and informal conversations.” And because of
that initial interaction, the team continued face-to-face meetings throughout
the project. End result: the plant was completed on time and on budget.
Another example of the value of a Dream Retreat occurred when we
worked with British Petroleum Ltd. in 1990. But far more than just a single
project was at stake in this instance. As the worldwide oil company bluntly
admitted, “Nothing short of a complete overhaul . . . was needed.” The
company was too autocratic. It was strangling in red tape. Turf consciousness
was impeding efficiency, and the company was hierarchical to the point of
paralysis. Not surprisingly, employee morale was also frighteningly low.
“The business climate is challenging,” a company report concluded, “and
only the best oil companies will survive into the 21st century.” At the rate the
octogenarian BP was going (the company was founded in 1909), that it would
live to see the next millennium was far from certain. Old oil fields were declin-
ing, and because of fiercely competitive conditions, new ones were tougher to
find. Costs were escalating. And skilled technicians were becoming scarcer.
To remedy the situation, the company had an ambitious organization-
wide innovation initiative. In fact, it envisioned an entirely new corporate
culture, one where a more participatory environment would give employees
the freedom and responsibility, within certain limits, to make decisions. A far
cry from the rigid command-and-control policies of the past, such an initia-
tive would be quite a change if the company could pull it off.
Bill launched a Dream Retreat that produced a major turnaround in
day-to-day office procedures. Managers became visible and present for their
employees, not deskbound behind closed doors. No longer were meetings run
from on high, with orders handed down and questions distinctly unwelcome.
Teams replaced the previous hierarchy throughout the company. Training
and coaching of employees was the order of the day. To bring the message of
this new company vision to all employees, BP held town-hall meetings.