Joy at Work. Dennis W. Bakke
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We are protecting them, taking care of them, making them useful—all for the rightful owner. For those operating within an organization, Block wrote, it is “the willingness to be accountable for the well-being of the larger organization by operating in service, rather than in control, of those around us. Stated simply, it is accountability without control or compliance.” My response was to make serving the needs of society the cornerstone of our corporate purpose.
Early in 1990, we began exploring the possibility of going public. Our privately held shareholder base was rapidly approaching 500 stockholders. Unless we took extraordinary measures to reduce the number of people who owned AES stock, we would be deemed a public company by law. One of our major concerns about going public was that serving shareholders might be incompatible with serving society. Could we maintain our values while striving to meet ambitious economic goals?
We consulted investment banking firms about our concerns.
There are four major shared values (at AES): to act with integrity, to be fair, to have fun, and to be socially responsible.
They were quite positive about our ability to live in the “public” world in a way that was consistent with our principles. I realized later that like many of us trained in sales, the bankers emphasized the positive aspects of our “strange” set of values and minimized the problems. One particularly persuasive banker even suggested that I owed it to the world to go public so that I could better spread the ideas of the company’s radical approach to organizational life.
Our board members were supportive of going public. I should have been more skeptical of their advice. I was already aware that some of them were very excited about the business prospects of the company but were less committed to our values than I was, or simply viewed them as a way to improve economic performance. I was convinced, however, that in spite of all the red flags, we could become a public company without losing our special qualities.
But a number of shareholders, many of them AES employees, were concerned that going public would change the company for the worse. Roger and I addressed some of their concerns with a letter to AES employees and shareholders in March 1991:
We have contemplated the pros and cons of being public since the beginning of AES. We have until now concluded that staying private made the most sense. However, we now believe that registration as a public company may ultimately be inevitable. … We continue to be committed to the purpose and values of AES. … To that end, we have established ‘Going Public Principles’ for ourselves. … These principles are: Make the process fun; if it stops being fun, we should change the way we are doing it or quit. … If we find ourselves tempted to change any significant elements of the way we do business, we must consider the change to be a major red flag and we should make the change only if our current rationale for acting as we do doesn’t make sense—independent of the public offering process. … We will do our best to uphold these principles [emphasis added].
True to our promise, we prepared the draft of our public-offering memo with a forthright paragraph under the “Business of the Company” section. It read as follows:
Adherence to AES’s Values—Possible Impact on Results of Operations. An important element of AES is its commitment to four major ‘shared’ values: to act with integrity, to be fair, to have fun, and to be socially responsible. See ‘Business—Values and Practices.’ AES believes that earning a fair profit is an important result of providing a quality product to its customers. However, if the Company perceives a conflict between these values and profits, the Company will try to adhere to its values—even though doing so might result in diminished profits or forgone opportunities. Moreover, the Company seeks to adhere to these values not as a means to achieve economic success, but because adherence is a worthwhile goal in and of itself. The Company intends to continue these policies after this offering.
When the draft document was reviewed by staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission, they offered a number of helpful suggestions. The most intriguing was advising us to move the above paragraph to the first section of the document called “Special Risk Factors” with the additional title “Possible Impact on Results of Operations.” This is the equivalent of a warning label on a medicine bottle. Investors might be told that a company has very little existing business, that it is essentially controlled by two principals who might die tomorrow, that there’s no guarantee it will be able to attract any new business. In our case, the SEC officials thought our values were a hazard.
We should attempt to live according to a set of unchanging shared ethical principles, because it is the right way to live.
Some of our people were upset by the SEC’s reaction. I loved it. I could now say that the U.S. government thought it was very risky to attempt to operate a business with integrity, fairness, social responsibility, and a sense of fun. AES has continued in all of its public offerings to carry the original statement, with only minor changes, describing its shared principles.
We should attempt to live according to a set of unchanging shared ethical principles, because it is the right way to live. Our efforts to do so need not be sweetened with additional benefits, such as better financial results, more successful recruiting, happier employees, or even improved productivity. These goals are worth pursuing irrespective of the bottom line. It is not only whether I live a certain way that is important. It is whether the way I attempt to live is based on true and moral principles.
We have made the workplace a frustrating and joyless place where people do what they’re told and have few ways to participate in decisions or fully use their talents.
CHAPTER 2
A Miserable Workplace
COLLIN DOHERTY ARRIVED a full hour before 6 a.m., the time he had been told to report to his new job at the textile mill. “Be here on time or I will give the job to another man,” were the parting words of the assistant mill supervisor who had offered him the job. Collin had awakened extra early that morning to walk the 3 miles from his farm to the new steam-powered textile mill in the village. He had been trying since before the plant opened to get hired. He did not want to be late.
Collin was 31 years old. He and Rowena had been married for 14 years. Ten children had been born to them, although only six were still living. The drought of the previous year and the particularly harsh winter that followed had been the last straw. The family had nearly starved that winter and did not have sufficient money to buy seed and replacement animals. Surviving another winter in Wales was not assured. Collin decided to quit farming and look for work in one of the new factories built in the region.
The family had planted crops and raised sheep and goats on the 5-hectare farm for at least the six generations recorded in the family Bible. Collin knew nothing else but dawn-to-dusk work to provide food and clothing for his family, just as his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had done before him.
The mill employed upwards of 100 workers. In addition, there were supervisors for each of the functions performed at the mill. The employees were divided into groups, each with a specialty. For example, one group prepared the wood for the steam engine, another operated the weaving machines, and still another rolled the cloth before sending it to the shipping department. The workers who maintained the steam engine and the weaving machines were paid more than the others because their jobs required the most skill. Each group of workers had a supervisor who gave instructions, set work schedules, and made sure every man and woman did his or her job in a specified manner.
Collin checked in at the plant gate and was shown to a little room off to the side, where he was met by a supervisor. “You are assigned to the clean-up crew in the weaving area,” the supervisor said. “You will be paid 1 shilling per week. Hours are 6 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday with 30 minutes off for lunch, as long as you have completed all your morning assignments. The mill will be closed Sundays and Christmas Day.” Collin was relieved that his family would have sufficient money to feed themselves. He also noted that he was expected to put in fewer hours at the mill than the average he spent working on the