Advice To Bosses: Try a Little Kindness

By John Greenwald

At a time when best-selling management-advice books tell corporate leaders how to behave like Attila the Hun, the philosophy at Herman Miller, Inc., is more closely attuned to the gentle precepts of St. Francis of Assisi. As described by chairman Max De Pree, 64, in Leadership Is an Art (Doubleday; $17.95), modern corporations should be communities, not battlefields. At their heart lie "covenants" between executives and employees that rest on "shared commitment to ideas, to issues, to values, to goals, and to management processes. Words such as love, warmth, personal chemistry are certainly pertinent."

This soulful style has worked well for Herman Miller (fiscal 1989 net sales: $793 million), a designer and manufacturer of office furniture based in Zeeland, Mich. The 66-year-old firm was rated among the ten most-admired U.S. corporations in FORTUNE's 1989 survey of executives and analysts. By another measure, $100 invested in Herman Miller stock in 1975 had grown to $5,156 by the end of last month.

Herman Miller attained its lofty status by treating its 5,400 workers not as adversaries but as participants in a shared enterprise. As De Pree notes in his book, every full-time Herman Miller employee has become a stockholder , after one year of service. Workers are organized into teams and earn quarterly bonuses based on benchmarks that take into account the ideas they have contributed. "Everyone has the right and duty to influence decision-making and to understand the results," De Pree writes.

A son of the company's founder, De Pree has little patience for by-the-book managers who ignore workers' needs for "spirit, excellence, beauty and joy." His criticism can be scathing: "Managers who have no beliefs but only understand methodology and quantification are modern-day eunuchs," he writes. "They can never engender competence or confidence."

De Pree's approach is far removed from standard business texts. A member of the Reformed Church in America and a graduate of the church-affiliated Hope College, he fondly cites St. Luke's characterization of a leader as "one who serves" and endorses a friend's observation that "leaders don't inflict pain; they bear pain." In one chapter he asks readers to consider what makes them weep.

Yet De Pree, who retired two years ago as Herman Miller's chief executive officer, is hardly a soft touch. At performance reviews, he regularly grilled top managers on such soul-searing topics as "Who are you?," "What have you abandoned?" and "What should grace enable us to be?" In a similar vein, De Pree provides a list of telltale signs that a company is in trouble. Among them: a proliferation of manuals, the disappearance of "tribal stories" that preserve a firm's traditions, and a "dark tension among key people."

Such pointers were culled from De Pree's 42-year business career, which included a painful slump in the mid-'80s when the company became too inwardly focused. His slim book grew out of a series of lectures that De Pree originally gave to adult-education classes. Like the elegant furniture his company makes, De Pree's book provides a valuable lesson in grace, style and the elements of success.