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August 2004 People
Business with Heart Dunc Robins is sitting in Sacred Grounds coffee shop in Arcata, Calif., watching his tea cool as he talks about his four years at Yakima Products, the company that brought him to this funky coastal outpost six hours north of San Francisco. It changed his life. In 1998, when Robins took over Yakima as CEO, the heart had been ripped out of the company. Arcata's largest manufacturer had been sold in a leveraged buyout four years earlier. Known nationally for its fine automobile roof racks, around town the company was prized for its employees' after-hours forging of "kinetic sculptures," the people-powered fantasies of sheet metal, bicycle wheels, and pontoons that race the dunes, sloughs, and cow pastures of Humboldt County each Memorial Day. The new owners didn't understand Yakima's culture—or Arcata's. In 1997, they moved assembly to Mexico. Forty local jobs were lost. Enter the outsider Robins, recruited from Easton Sports in Southern California. Robins could see that Yakima, though profitable, was going sideways. It was a two-product company that saw no need to grow. Robins convened a town hall meeting of the remaining local employees and proceeded to introduce the notion that profit is not intrinsically a bad thing. Then he and his managers boarded a couple of kinetic sculptures and careened up Highway 101 for a retreat in Redwood National Park. "It was all about creating a business plan from the heart," he says. The plan worked. Yakima took off—in large part, he believes, thanks to "relational management," in which networks of small entrepreneurial teams work in an environment of trust and tolerance. Four years later, with Yakima launching 50 to 100 new products a year, Robins left the company. But he remains in Arcata, where he has founded or cofounded five companies in the past two years. He also consults to large equity firms and has written a book based largely on his Yakima experience called Business Euphoria: Powering Relational Organizations with Gangs, Gall, and Gossip. The book's cover shows a smiling team of people and a blue moon rising. "Blue moons are thought to be mythical," Robins writes, "but actually occur every two to three years, roughly the time it takes for a relational organization to achieve business euphoria, the ultimate organizational experience." |
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August 2004 People
Curtain Calling As general manager of the San Francisco Ballet, Lesley Koenig does just about everything but dance. Koenig is in charge of all productions at the company, which she has managed since 2002. She is responsible for touring, facilities, computer services, and budgets, and oversees the creation of new productions, 10 last year alone. She also negotiates contracts with individual dancers, choreographers, and designers, and in her first year as general manager concluded collective bargaining agreements with all seven of the company's unions. She loves her work. "I'm not happy unless I'm someplace where a big gold curtain goes up," Koenig says. At 17 she got a job as a stage manager with the San Francisco Opera, and, at 23, became the Metropolitan Opera's youngest director. After 18 seasons at the Met directing upward of 30 operas, she decided she wanted to run her own opera company. "Management and directing operas are not all that different," she explains. "I directed all three of the Three Tenors, and if you think getting Luciano Pavarotti to do what you want …" Koenig spent a year arming herself with calculus and statistics and, at age 42, enrolled at the Business School. It wasn't an easy transition. "I just didn't speak the language," she says. "They kept saying, 'You have to think outside the box,' and I spent two years looking for the box." But Stanford was like any big job. "You can't walk in and fail. When people give you a big chance, you can't fail. "I have used everything I learned," she says. And she has—in her own way. "I didn't do all that well in operations or accounting, but now I deal with finances all day long. I'm perfectly comfortable reading a spreadsheet. Every number is like a story, I tell myself, like an opera. I just look at the story behind the numbers." Koenig still wants to run an opera. "I always want to do something I haven't done before," she explains. "I'm not happy if I'm not out on a cliff."
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