Wild Wear makes clothing, rain gear, and sleeping bags for hikers
and other outdoor enthusiasts. The company began when Myrtle
Kelly began sewing pile jackets that her husband Ray sold on
college campuses. It now employs almost five hundred people
organized into traditional divisions such as marketing,
manufacturing, and research and development.
Recently it became apparent that although Wild Wear's balance
sheet appeared healthy, the company was stagnant. Everyone
seemed to work hard, and the company's products seldom
flopped. Yet Wild Wear seemed to have developed a "me too"
posture, bringing new products to market a season or a full year
after competitors.
The Kellys, who still run the company, pored over performance
appraisals looking for the weak points that might be holding the
company back. But it seemed that the human resources
department had been doing its work. R&D was coming up with a
respectable number of new products, the manufacturing facility
was modern and efficient, and the marketing tactics often won
praise from customers.
Baffled, the Kellys called a meeting of middle-level managers,
hoping they could provide some answers they had missed. They
were shocked when they noticed that the managers were
introducing themselves as they came in and sat down. People
who had been working in the same company for years had never
even met! The meeting began with this observation, and for ninety
minutes the Kellys sat back and listened to the problems their
managers raised.
It became clear that in the attempt to grow from a family operation
into a larger company, the Kellys had assumed the two needed to
be very different. When they started out, the two of them handled
all aspects of the business. Ray would hear from a customer that
backpackers really needed a certain product. He would pass the
idea on to Myrtle and order the materials she needed, and within
a few weeks he would offer the product to the delighted customer.
As the company grew, the Kellys began to worry about their lack
of formal business training and hired professionals to run each
division and set up appropriate rules and procedures.
What they had created, the middle managers informed them, was
a number of very efficient, productive divisions that might as well
have been separate companies. The R&D people might come up
with a new breathable fabric for rain gear, only to find that
production had just begun making a new rainwear line out of the
old fabric and that marketing was turning all its attention to selling
the big inventory of sleeping bags. Each division did the best it
could with the information it had, but that information was very
incomplete. Products progressed linearly from one division to the
next, but it always seemed as though an idea that had been
ahead of its time did not yield a product until the time had passed.
To remedy the problem, the Kellys decided to call in a
management consultant to create more of a matrix structure for
Wild Wear. While they were waiting for the consultant's solutions,
they began holding weekly "horizon" meetings. The group of
middle managers would get together every Monday and discuss
what they saw on their horizon. After less than a month of such
meetings, the excitement generated promised better things for
Wild Wear as the managers stretched to expand their own
horizons and to help others bring their ideas to light.