Big Think

Topic: Managing employees

Jeff Swartz: There are things that we can do. I’ve got a page in my notebook that is called culture and I try to update it every week, meaning I carry this little notebook and I try to think of different ways to approach the question of scale because the godfather was right about just about everything, but he got it wrong when he said the equivalent of it’s nothing personal, it’s just business.

You know the line from Springsteen. He said, “At the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.” I don’t want to have to wait until the end of the day to cast a vote for like what was today all about and so yeah, we have businesses at Timberland. We own a brand called SmartWool in Colorado. There is 72 people there in one building in Steamboat Springs and real line of sight. People are connected. They know each other’s story. How to do it with 5,000? I can’t know people’s story the same way and it can’t be about me anyways, but it has to be about a culture where people do want to know your name and they do want to hear your story and in a funny way we’ve really succeeded in that regard. We’ve really succeeded in creating an active citizenship at Timberland where I may not know your name. I know you know mine because of who I am, but you don’t know me either, but it doesn’t matter because if you’re in pain or if you’re in confusion you have real relationships around your desk or your community. It is part of the ethic of we don’t live in New Market anymore. We’re in Stratum, New Hampshire now, just down the road, but that ethic of town meeting and that ethic of speaking truth to power and asking questions and demanding acknowledgement as a human that’s still a very big part of our culture. Look, I do town meetings with pretty high regularity, sometimes in video, sometimes in person. Cultures are different. When I go to Japan to the town meeting I know that I got to have five questions planted because no one is going to ask the first question and I’ve got to have one criticism planted and everybody will look around and then they’re like Jeff planted the criticism, but then they remember oh yeah, that’s right, it’s okay to ask those kind of questions. And so it takes two hours to do a one hour meeting in Japan because I just got to give them a chance to live in their culture, but I also I got to spend the two hours because otherwise we end up being a big company and that would be no fun.

Topic: Communication

Jeff Swartz: We have three elements of our strategic plan. One is build brand heat and height. They can rap it back at you. Everybody in the warehouse in California can tell me number one, brand heat and brand height. Okay, but what does that mean in your day? What are you doing differently today than yesterday? And they think I’m in the warehouse what does that have to do with brand heat and brand height and so and they are by the way the reason that our brand is only so cool and so successful is because there is a lot that they can be doing and they have power and strength and insight and genius, but we’re not calling on it because there is a gap between concept and execution and so taking it down to the desktop to me that is the... What iTunes allows you to do which is to reach in and bring it right down to your personal device that’s the… We’ve got to find a way from a management perspective to take the highest concept and drill it down to the most concrete place 5,000 times and then… 5,000 people, and then regularly update it. People have to be connected to the mission to care about it.

Topic: Hiring

Jeff Swartz: the best example I can give you is there was a guy who came to Timberland from the pedigree world and he grew up in our treasury department, so it’s analytical and powerful and rigorous and about 12 years into it I realized that there is a real human being in the treasurer’s office and so I went down to his office one day and I said, “Here’s a strange one.” He goes, “Go ahead.” I said, “I’d like you to run sales and marketing for us outside the United States.” And he didn’t even laugh because he is like, “Come on.” “What are you doing in my office?” And I said, “No, I’m dead serious about it.” We’ve been through five really pedigreed sales and marketing internationals, like ****, perfect yeah, right? I got a British guy. I got an Italian guy. I got a Chinese guy and they all flamed out. And so he said, “I’ve never been outside the United States on Timberland business ever.” I said, “Perfect, but I trust you.” “The team trusts you.” “You’re a for real smart guy.” “We’ll figure this out.” “Let’s make a slow transition.” “We’ll take a year.” “You travel with me every month to Europe for a year until we’re ready.” Six months into it he says to me, “I got it.” Not like I got it, I’m dead, but I got it, cool. He said, “You’re right.” “They trust me.” “I trust them back.” “We can do this.” He was the best international guy we ever had in the history of the company except for me because I did it before, but for real executives he killed it and he had zero experience, but he had intellectual model. He had integrity. He had respect in the organization. He could work the levers. The undervaluing the strength of culture is a failure that I got to remind myself not to make. We do need external talent. We need to bring in diverse points of view, but we also need to recognize there is an incredible ownership class at Timberland of people who they absolutely give a darn, which is not like standard operating procedure. It’s cool. And we need to honor that, which means invest in training folks. We haven’t done enough of that. We’re a place where like figure it out. We got things to do. We’re becoming more self-conscious about the need to invest in talent because we value the strength of our culture.

I can give you examples of really powerful professionals who have been successful in other organizations in the same function who come to Timberland. Well I’ll give you a for instance of a guy who was successful despite it. He came to Timberland from Pepsi. He was trained in their finance organization and that’s a very… That’s world-class. I mean it’s the best of the best. And he said to me about six months into the job or maybe nine months into the job. He said, “I’m not sure I’m going to stay.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “You know at Pepsi they teach us institutional thoughts.” So there is a way to do things. There is the Pepsi way. And he said, “I brought that with me.” “That’s what you wanted, right?” I said, “Yeah, yeah.” And he said, “And I keep trying to fit it in here and it’s really clear to me that there are elements of the Pepsi way which are right that won’t work here.” And so he said, “I am faced with a choice will I reinvent my…?” He called it a mind map. “Will I reinvent my mind map?” “Is it worth it enough to me to do that or should I go somewhere else where they won’t require me to reinvent the mind map, but they’ll simply value it.” Pepsi’s finance organization is an up or out organization, so they have 50 people for every ten slots, 50 capable people, so they know 40 of them are leaving and so people circle around like sucker fish around White Plains and it’s a well tried path. You get great finance people out of Pepsi. We got this guy and so he said most of the Pepsi alumni go to a place where people say, “Tell us what to do boss.” “We’ll do it your way.” That’s what we hired you for. He said, “You guys are like stiff-necked Yankees up here in New Hampshire and I see strength in it, but it’s a big ask.” “You’re asking me to sort of reinvent myself and I’m not sure I want to do it.” And I’m listening very politely.

And so three, four months went by and he came back and he said, “What do you think?” And I said, “I see.” “I see you kind of twisting and turning and it’s amazing and I appreciate it very much.” And he had… But it hits the second part of your question because that was on him. It wasn’t like he came to Timberland and I said, “Hey, I recognize the power of our culture and so let me help you with this transition.” I was like, “There is the swimming pool.” “Good luck.” And his strength was in the swimming pool he realized I’m swimming in Jell-O, not water and so if I want to not drown I’m going to have to put on floaties and he did. So he was successful. He chose to leave the company in the end and his professionalism and his strength is missed. He was a very, very, very capable guy and so we couldn’t retain him. He didn’t fail. We couldn’t retain him. I learned a lot from that about bringing executives at that level of the company because the power of their pedigree is they know what to do or at least they know what they think they’re supposed to do. We have to spend different kind of time helping people succeed in our culture and so we have two or three new executives that are joining in this 60 days and we have a very, very concentrated effort against making our culture transparent to them so that they can bring their skills and strengths against not hidden traps and ambushes, so we hope that the process, which I learned much from this guy, will be we can leverage what we learned from them.

Recorded on September 21, 2009