Management by travel

Last week I wrote about Florida Power and Light learning Total Quality Control from Kansai Electric in Japan, and I mentioned that "FPL and Kansai set up an extensive program of travel and visitation, so that personnel from each company could build personal contacts with their counterparts." It was a single bullet-point in an article largely about other things, so many readers might have missed it. But the technique is a powerful one.

Years ago, I worked for a Bosch subsidiary called ETAS. ETAS had run as an ambitious startup for some years by then. They were beginning to expand, with sales and development offices outside of Germany. But they wanted to preserve the unique company culture that had brought them their early success. Now, culture requires communication, and the most effective communication is always in-person. Nothing else replaces being there. So the company made a strategic decision for several years to invest in business travel.

This meant that the office in California where I worked had regular visitors—from the other ETAS office in America, and from the home office in Germany. We had workshops to bring together our engineers with their counterparts from other product lines. Likewise for the sales force; likewise for the customer service team. The global Process Owners for each of the business processes in our Quality Management System visited regularly to check how the systems were working for us. Nor was the travel all in one direction: there were events held in Germany by this department or that one, and our people were regularly invited—expected—to attend.

The organizational structure was international, as well. For some years my immediate supervisor sat in Germany. (I was still in California, so we were separated by nine time zones.) Three key positions in our office's management structure were filled by ETAS personnel who relocated from Germany. On the other hand, ETAS's Global Director for Operations and Finance was an American. International conference calls were routine, and so was the travel.

Not my passport. I downloaded this
picture from Wikipedia.
But you get the idea.

One of my topics in the Quality department was internal audits. The ETAS program assumed that for each internal audit there should be at least one auditor from somewhere else, to avoid the risk that a local auditor might get jaded by familiarity and stop seeing nonconformities. So I routinely led audits in our other American office, and in Germany; and we routinely invited my German colleagues to come audit in California. I didn't realize quite how routine the travel had become until one day the Passport Control officer in the Stuttgart Airport had to search for a blank page to stamp and finally told me, "You come here a lot."     

So did it work? Yes! It worked very well.

The net result of all this travel is that we really were able to work with our colleagues from other offices and other countries as if they were just down the hall. It was not unusual for me to chat with one of our engineers and hear him casually reference recent conversations with our German top management—referring to them by first name. We discussed common concerns, asked and gave support on common projects, all as if we were working in the same building. Of course there were occasional misunderstandings arising from imperfect translation or differing legal backgrounds; but they were easily managed, because we had built up friendship and familiarity by working together.

Ultimately, as the company continued to mature, we got to the point where it was no longer as critical as it had once been to reinforce the cultural framework; and we no longer poured quite so much money into travel. The savings certainly made a difference: there is no question that our travel-based management strategy had been very expensive. At the same time, it is also unarguable that it helped tie together a collection of far-flung offices into a single operating unit. 

Do I recommend the same strategy for every company? Well of course it depends. Not every company has multiple offices in different countries; of the companies that do, not all of those need their offices to work together seamlessly. As a result, many companies don't need anything like this approach. And I'm sure that some companies which might otherwise benefit from it, can't afford it. If the margins in your industry are too narrow, that limits what options are available to you. 

But it is still true that the best communication takes place in-person. It is still true that no electronic tool ever quite takes the place of being there. That's what makes travel and visitation such powerful tools for building a culture and binding a company together.