In ten years, Plant World had grown from a one-person venture
into the largest nursery and landscaping business in its area. Its
founder, Myta Ong, combined a lifelong interest in plants with a
botany degree to provide a unique customer service. Ong had
managed the company's growth so that even with twenty full-time
employees working in six to eight crews, the organization culture
was still as open, friendly, and personal as it had been when her
only "employees" were friends who would volunteer to help her
move a heavy tree.
To maintain that atmosphere, Ong involved herself increasingly
with people and less with plants as the company grew. With
hundreds of customers and scores of jobs at any one time, she
could no longer say without hesitation whether she had a dozen
arborvitae bushes in stock or when Mrs. Carnack's estate would
need a new load of bark mulch. But she knew when Rose had
been up all night with her baby, when Gary was likely to be late
because he had driven to see his sick father over the weekend,
and how to deal with Ellen when she was depressed because of
her boyfriend's behavior. She kept track of the birthdays of every
employee and even those of their children. She was up every
morning by five-thirty arranging schedules so that John could get
his son out of daycare at four o'clock and Martina could be back
in town for her afternoon high school equivalency classes.
Paying all this attention to employees may have led Ong to make
a single bad business decision that almost destroyed the
company. She provided extensive landscaping to a new mall on
credit, and when the mall never opened and its owners went
bankrupt, Plant World found itself in deep trouble. The company
had virtually no cash and had to pay off the bills for the mall
plants, most of which were not even salvageable.
One Friday, Ong called a meeting with her employees and leveled
with them: either they would not get paid for a month or Plant
World would fold. The news hit the employees hard. Many
counted on the Friday paycheck to buy groceries for the week.
The local unemployment rate was low, however, and they knew
they could find other jobs.
But as they looked around, they wondered whether they could
ever find this kind of job. Sure, the pay was not the greatest, but
the tears in the eyes of some workers were not over pay or
personal hardship; they were for Ong, her dream, and her
difficulties. They never thought of her as the boss or called her
anything but "Myta." And leaving the group would not be just a
matter of saying good-bye to fellow employees. If Bernice left, the
company softball team would lose its best pitcher, and the
Sunday game was the height of everyone's week. Where else
would they find people who spent much of the weekend working
on the best puns with which to assail one another on Monday
morning? At how many offices would everyone show up twenty
minutes before starting time just to catch up with friends on other
crews? What other boss would really understand when you
simply said, "I don't have a doctor's appointment, I just need the
afternoon off"?
Ong gave her employees the weekend to think over their decision:
whether to take their pay and look for another job or to dig into
their savings and go on working. Knowing it would be hard for
them to quit, she told them they did not have to face her on
Monday; if they did not show up, she would send them their
checks. But she couldn't help wondering how many employees
she would still have when Monday came around.