From The Soul at Work by Roger Lewin and Birute Regine

Story I: "DuPont: Down on the Plant"

"When Dick Knowles arrived as Belle's new plant manager in April of 1987, he knew he faced an uphill battle, both to get the plan working efficiently again and thus avoid the loss of jobs, and to heal the relationship with the surrounding community." Dick Knowles was unwillingly transferred to this severely deficient problem plant because he was having a relationship with a co-worker in Niagara Falls, NY. It was either get fired, or move to Belle, SC. He moved.

"Gradually Dick developed a style of management practice that is advocated by complexity science: namely, valuing people for themselves, attending to relationships, stripping down hierarchy, including everyone in a rich web of information flow." This plant was like a sick person in need of healing. They had far too many accidents and injuries, and almost all of the workers were just going through the motions of their jobs. Knowles "decided my first objective would be to meet everyone, every single person in the plant,

It seems that they were all conditioned to perform in a way that was rather calculating. "We were conditioned to a certain way of doing business, where you had to strategize things in the back room so that a certain thing would play out a certain way, even though there were players who never had the whole picture of what was really going on." In meetings, John was known to say things like, " 'Here's the story, guys...And you've got to know this because we can't deal with this without you. I'm not keeping anything from you'. People listened and they questioned. It was an extraordinary experience for the staff to see their leader be forthright with them, to show himself as vulnerable and not in absolute control."

"People become more fulfilled because they are involved and they see their ideas valued. People begin to discover meaning in their work. You could see it in their posture, how they walked, in their faces." Another thing Knowles changed was the meetings at the plant. "I suggested that from then on at meetings I wouldn't sit at the head of the table, which was a kind of power seat." He decided to let people rotate being at the head seat, to conduct the meetings. After reading a list of rules for treating people from a manager at another plant, Knowles took their basic principles and wrote his own. He hung these everywhere you could think, from control rooms to offices to the lunchrooms:

11. People want to be informed about the business and get early feedback on the performance of their part of the operation.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2895
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)