Excerpt
May 04, 2011
I wanted to share this company with my employees. In the beginning, it was the pain I wanted to share as much as the profit. I wanted the workers to worry. Did any of them ever spend a moment on the weekend wondering how the company was doing, asking herself if she'd made the right decisions the week before? Maybe I was unrealistic, but I wanted that level of involvement. After a bad start, I had begun see that they knew more about the company and its operations than I or the new managers I'd hired. They were better qualified to plan production for the next day, the coming week, the month ahead. They had more immediate knowledge of materials, workload, and production problems. They were ideally placed to control costs and cut waste. But how could I give them some reason to care? I began holding monthly informational meetings called state-of-the-business talks in Smogtown to let them know how the company was doing. The only trouble was that the workers had no stake in the company. If they wanted more money or less work or another holiday, it didn't come out of their pockets; it came out of mine. That led me to the idea of profit sharing. If they got part of the profits, then extra costs and expenses would come out of their pockets too.
