A New Model for the Nature of Business: It's Alive! --- Forget the Mechanical -- Today's Leaders Embrace the Biological
Most people think factories should run with machine-like precision, but not Charlene Pedrolie. After becoming manufacturing chief at Rowe Furniture of Salem, Va., she tore apart the assembly line and sent gluers, staplers and seamstresses madly scurrying to build sofas as they saw fit. Amid the pandemonium of the shop floor, productivity and quality shot through the roof. Major corporations jealously track every dollar and proscribe the actions of every employee, right? Wrong, in the case of the family-owned Koch Industries of Wichita, Kan. Operating mainly in energy and agriculture -- industries performing poorly almost everywhere else -- Koch has grown bigger than Microsoft, Coke or McDonald's in sales, with no budgets, no central planning and no fixed job descriptions.</br></br>Economic pundits say small-time middlemen are toast in a high-tech economy. But they haven't met Jerry "the Seal Man" Whitlock, who buys and sells more than $1 million a year of seals and gaskets world-wide, mostly over the Internet from a spare bedroom in his house.</br></br>Business is at war with family life, people say. But not at a chain of used-book outlets called Half Price Books. It has become the largest used-book dealer in the U.S. by expanding into cities where employees and family members have a personal reason to move.</br></br>For the last four years I've been investigating such rule-breaking success stories in The Front Lines column for this page. But as the case studies piled up -- my travels took me to more than 100 cities in 30 states to industries as far-flung as semiconductor design and grease recycling -- the unusual seemed more and more like the norm. Everywhere I turned, it seemed, people were succeeding in business by doing the exact opposite of what business had long counted as conventional.</br></br>Was it possible that these offbeat leaders were becoming the new order of business? Was I witnessing a new ethos or simply some new fads? A new dawn or some new Dilbert fodder? The arrival of a new day or simply the ascendancy of a new generation? These questions forced me to consider business on an unfamiliar new level. What were the most fundamental forces guiding business?