DICK NETTELL

I started asking the managers the question, "Why are we doing this?" And the answer was, "Well, audit says, audit says." Now, my perspective is, is nobody died and made audit God. Audit provides a very good service for us ...But audit shouldn't be in a position to tell us how to manage our business. ...And we put in a process -- all I did was write a memo to file -- first of all, I told my boss I was going to do this, to make sure he wasn't going to have a heart attack, and he was OK with it.
But I wrote a memo to file that said, "Effective immediately, we can have as many people can go in through those man traps at one time as we can get through it, but we're going to leave it up to our employees to make sure that everybody in the man trap with them, whoever sticks that badge in the slot, all has a badge and they recognize each other. And then, immediately, we no longer had a log jam with people coming back from lunch.


NARRATOR:

In organizations like the Bank of America, challenging the process may seem like a dangerous concept. But in the Support Services division, it was a concept that almost immediately began paying rewards.

DICK NETTEL

When they built the mail room here, they asked the management at the time, "What do you want the mail room to look like?" And they said, "We want it to look exactly like it looked like across the street."

They had all the mail bags outside of the glass cage, where the work was actually staged to go out by the couriers. But the actual physical sorting of the mail and documents took place in this cage. Well, you can imagine, all night long, people running in and out of this cage. Well, the way they got in it is, they would hit a button on the outside that would ring a buzzer inside. Somebody would have to stop doing what they were doing, look to see if that person belonged in there, and hit another button, and it'd open the door.

This happened tens of hundreds of times a night, back and forth. for seven years, we had people ringing the damn buzzer and stopping what they're doing and back and forth, simply because nobody said, "Why in the hell are we doing this?"

So, that night I had all these doors disabled. Well, I was a hero because the staff had to think we were just absolute flaming idiots. Uh, well, the real moral of the story is -- so we got that done. First of all, from a results standpoint, the productivity levels went up 12 percent overnight. It was hitting a light switch.


NARRATOR

Challenge the process... think creatively...dare to take a risk, and learn from your failures: these were the concepts that Dick Nettell believed in, and drove home every way he could.

DICK NETTELL

I took a look and our average managers had been in position for eight years...So, we went through a process where I got my DRs involved and we put names up on the board and we spent a whole day figuring who we were going to move where.


LORETTA GILL

Well, in the very beginning, um, I had a difficult time, when Dick asked us all to switch positions around. Um, it was a risk he was taking, but that's one of the things that Dick liked to do, is take risks. So, um, I was very apprehensive in the beginning, because the corporation that I came from, when you worked in projects, usually that meant that you were on your way out the door. So, I didn't see it as a challenge at the very beginning. I saw it as almost like a reprimand or something. You know, my first instinct was, "What did I do wrong?" Yeah. But it ended up being very challenging.

DICK NETTELL

And what happened is, those folks went into those new businesses and wanted to make their mark. They wanted to make changes. They wanted to make their mark on that business, so that they could show -- because competition, if it's done right, is really powerful.


BRUCE ZIMMERMAN

Then he takes four of his key production managers and rotates them. Now, all of a sudden, everybody's got a level of discomfort going to work. Everybody's got different challenges, and, so, everybody in that situation at the same time. So, there was a blessing in disguise because every one of us had to rely upon the other.

NARRATOR

For the Support Services Division, risk-taking became a way of life...a style of doing business woven so firmly into the fabric of the culture that challenging the process became a standard criterion in every performance review.

DICK NETTELL

The way that we work evaluations is, at the beginning of the year, for my folks, we'll sit down together and create a performance plan. And for that specific objective, it read, "Challenge the process to" -- "During this rating period, challenge the process to the point of a failure. Be prepared, during coaching sessions, to discuss those occasions where this has occurred,"


DAN RILEY

Don't fail too big, Dick. Um, Dick and I talked about that because it was culturally a change uh, that uh, Dick wanted to institute and I thought it was a healthy change because it was a different way of thinking about the business. Uh, but we also talked about the, the kinds of things that uh, we, we wanted to test it on, on a risk basis that the managers had to understand that not succeeding without the proper thought process and without the proper risk reward analysis and without having some ability for contingency was not good management.


DICK NETTELL

Yeah, I talked to--I remember talking to first of all, a gentleman that--I didn't report directly to Dan. Dan was our division head. Um, and I talked to my manager at, at the time and he absolutely agreed in concept with, with the process but then when you see it in writing it was--I got one of these well, yeah, go ahead and do it. Uh, but, you know, very lukewarm kind of reaction. Uh, Dan teased me about it. You know, he was willing to support it absolutely but he gave me that look like oh, Christ, he's lost his mind again.


BRUCE ZIMMERMAN

The way he had it structured, and the fact that you would present to him, "Hey, this is what I intend to do, this is where we may fall short of our objective," you know, that kind of cleared up that, that scenario. And, basically, the message was, "Hey, let's go for it all, let's go for broke. Let's push it to the point where we can't push any more." Unless you try that, you'll never get there. You'll never reach the top without, you know, looking over and knowing that you can fall over to the other side.

LORETTA GILL

When we met with him during our one-on-ones or met with him monthly, he did ask us what we did to challenge the process. Are we pushing it to the extent of failure? What we had done that month.
And the one thing I can say with Dick is he, you know, we can go back to him being supportive, but, um, if you did do something or you pushed it to the extent of failure, even if you did fail, I mean, you were not reprimanded from it. The first thing he always asked you is, "What did you learn from it?"


DAVID LYNCH

When I look at the future of Dick's challenges and why I think he'll be successful is because what Dick is doing is not looking at his own organization as an entity. He's looking outside even the world of banking. He is looking at world class customer service organizations like Nordstrums, like first class companies and I believe he'll build and model his organization like that and when you come back and talk to me a year from now I believe that's what I'll be able to report to you.


NARRATOR

In an organization like the Bank of America, change comes about slowly. Established policies and procedures have been designed to protect their customers, and ensure the safety of the bank's assets.

But in the bank's Support Services Division, policies have changed... procedures have been improved...and the division as a whole runs much more smoothly, because the people who work there learned not to be afraid, to take a risk.

BRUCE ZIMMERMAN

If everybody were to challenge the process, then you're going to have each employee kind of question, "Why are we doing it this way? Wouldn't it be better if we did it that way?" And if you drive that down to the non-official level, to the very basic clerical machine operator, they're going to feel that their opinion is valued by management, and that's very important. And we can start implementing things that these guys see that management can't see.


NARRATOR

A new way of thinking, that's given each person in the Support Services Division a new way of approaching their jobs..a new attitude, where risk and failure are no longer avoided at all costs...and a new way of doing business, that everyone has benefitted from.


DICK NETTELL

In today's environment, if you want to be successful, doing things the same way just ain't going to get it done, period. Uh, expectations continue to be raised, uh, by our shareholders, by our managers and by our customers. And if we're not willing to be innovative and do things differently, we're going to have the competition pass us like we're sitting still on the freeway.

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