PULLING THE RELEASE LEVER

When the leader of a corporation gets his or her head out of the machine, the creative force of capitalism is liberated to move in a new direction. Take John Akehurst, the former CEO of Woodside Petroleum Corporation, which is a publicly traded Australian oil and gas production company. Now, Akehurst certainly doesn't look like someone you'd identify in a lineup as a revolutionary. He looks more like a mild-mannered behind-the-desk man—and yet there is an ease and openness about him that suggest far more than the fact that he's enjoying his retirement. John Akehurst, if you hear him tell it, is a transformed man. And his transformation led to remarkable changes within Woodside Petroleum.

As a tough-minded “command-and-control” executive, Akehurst joined Woodside in 1994 to cut operating costs and improve performance. He reduced the workforce by twenty-five percent and, using the best practices known within the mechanistic model, Woodside's performance definitely improved. By 1999, the company had doubled in size and was a very high performer on the Australian stock exchange. Their vision, “to be the best operator of oil and gas facilities in the world,” says Akehurst, “proved to be very inspiring for people in the workplace—for a few years.” While he doesn't know why—perhaps his employees burned out, or maybe the time had simply come—the momentum driving Woodside to be the most efficient oil producer possible came to an abrupt halt. “We ran out of steam,” he says. “All of a sudden, I heard people saying, 'What are we really doing all this for? What's the meaning of all this? Is it all about slaving away to reduce costs by another two or three percent per year for the next decade? What's the purpose of life at work?'”

Akehurst was confounded. And no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't come up with a new vision for the company. They were stuck. Unbeknownst to him, he was hitting the walls of the machine—reaching the limits of his own way of thinking. Through surveys, the top managers discovered that the employees felt that the management didn't trust them and that they were not given an appropriate level of autonomy. “My first reaction as chief executive was to say, 'Well, that's rubbish. Bunch of wimps—tell them to read the authorities manual and get on with it.' Only when this persisted did I start to recognize that there were some more underlying issues to address,” he says. “The behavior that we exhibited in the office was quite inefficient. People used knowledge as power. The interpersonal behavior between individuals was often competitive. We could see the problem, but we were at our wits' end to know how to address it. We knew that we had to pull the 'people lever'—people and values—but the question was How?” “Pulling the people lever”—a mechanistic metaphor if there ever was one—meant that Akehurst and his team decided to change Woodside's culture to bring about greater cooperation and creativity. Little did they know that pulling that “lever,” if you are sincere about creating change, can release you from the mechanistic mindset.

John Akehurst found himself and his top management team in a workshop with Michael Rennie, a partner at the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, and Gita Bellin, a leader in the human potential movement. The effect of the workshop, which was like nothing they had ever done before, was profound. “Perhaps the biggest and most simple thing that we recognized was that our behavior as leaders was creating the things that we were grumbling about in the rest of the organization,” he recalls. “Other people were not being creative and were not acting autonomously because we thought we knew all the answers and kept telling them what to do instead of giving them directional guidance and coaching them so that they had the space to grow, express themselves in the workplace, and deliver the product of their ideas and efforts on time.”

For Akehurst, the experience was a personal revelation. “I was a bit of a bully,” he confesses, with disarming frankness. Like any modern manager, he says, “I'm very good at analytic things. This is very useful in business. But in our 'command-and-control' environment at the time, I also used my intellect to brutalize people without fully recognizing what I was doing.” Akehurst began to seek feedback from his subordinates: “I'd ask people to point out to me after a meeting if I'd slipped back into some of my angry and bullying ways.” But more significantly, he discovered something about himself that stunned him. “The big thing for me was recognizing that I had not felt joy in my life for a long time. I walked around with this cloud of anxiety: Were we going to make our business performance goals? Had I made the right choice about this, that, or the other?” he tells me. “I recognized that this was not good for the business, and I also had a personal yearning for things to be different. I just knew, 'I cannot go on like this.'” During the workshop, when he finally let go of the “shield” that he had built up on his way to becoming a CEO, “there was a huge sense of togetherness as a team.” Akehurst says simply, “The external environment is not different; it's just that I've chosen a different way of being.”

The machine is not simply a metaphor. It is a state of consciousness. A new creativity can be released when leaders reach beyond the numbers and controls to find out what moves the human beings inside organizations. “What we found was that if you ask people to stretch to reach for a higher human purpose and meaning,” Akehurst explains, “they will be more courageous about what they are doing. Then miraculous things happen that are well beyond the previous expectations of the individuals and the company.” For example, discovering that many in the organization felt ashamed about working with nonrenewable resources (even though the company was also engaged in developing sustainable forms of energy), they faced the issue straight on. “We were able to take on a far more challenging vision. We had the temerity to see ourselves as a service provider to humanity.” Akehurst tells me, “We decided that we were only going to do things if we could be proud of them, which really caught the imagination of the workforce. Someone would say, 'Wouldn't it be exciting for us to go to another country, produce their first oil and gas, and do it in a way that is profitable and actually enhances the unspoiled environment and the economy of that terribly poor nation?' Then people would get really excited, realizing that they could make a real contribution to humanity.” By stepping outside the corporate mindset, Akehurst made possible a new kind of capitalist creativity that is generative.

So the leader goes first. When he or she abandons the command-and-control outpost at the top of the corporate hierarchy and begins to engage in authentic relationships that include shared learning, commitment to a vision, and a deeper integrity, then the blood begins to flow in the organization. But transformation cannot stop with the leader. The machine needs to be dismantled. The whole system needs to change.