Good morning everybody. Another sunny “winter” day has just started in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo, where I live. Today I want to present our great friend “Swimmy” to You. But at first let me share with You, how this very important cultural concept has been developped by us.
As I have already explained in former posts, I took over responsability as President of our company Vulkan do Brasil in Itatiba, Sao Paulo, in September 2014, when our company – due to lots of historical reasons and situations – unfortunately had been in a very bad shape. But our reconstruction started immediately and after a complete restructuring process we reinvented ourselfes within a little more than a year and gained a lot of strength and dynamic from then on. With clear focus on the recovery of the satisfaction of our customers and the strong increase of our competitivity, I had launched a capaign internally from my first day at the company on, within which I described to all our employees my dreams of a our factory becoming “swiss clockwork”. With this symbolic picture was ment that we wanted our factory to become a well organized mechanism, which just works in the most efficient way and without any unnecessary interruptions and disturbancies. I will explain our concept of the “swiss clockwork” in a future post in more details.
What happened really is, that after another year or so of hard work and implementation of lots of new processes and improvements, our factory since the end of 2015 had really become extremely efficient and showed impressive productivity results. So far my dream of the “swiss clockwork” was obviously coming true.
But what we found out during this time, was that the high motivation of all our employees to continue aggressively with the improvement of our “swiss clockwork” started to create somehow egoistic behaviour at several departments. Obviously many employees were totally decided to optimise their own work and processes without taking into consideration those of other colleagues and other departments.
This was very good for the improvements of many isolated processes and the achievement of excelent results of certain groups of employees. But it became clear for my management team colleagues and me, that this was definitely not, what we were aiming at. Because the sum of several isolated good results and situations does not mean that they all together also show a good result and situation. A strong and successful team is knowingly much more than just the joining of several very strong individuals, as we can very nicely and often see in the world of sports, like in soccer.
It took us a good while, to become really clear about this situation and challenge until I finally got the clue shortly before the end of 2015. When surfing in the internet, I found the picture book “Swimmy”, written for small children by Leo Lionni in 1963.
The book is the story of a very small fish who is curious and adventurous, exploring the sea after being forced away from his home. When he meets a new big familly of small red fishes hidden behind rocks, he excitedly asks them all to come out and play, but they refuse. They are afraid of the big black tuna fish and don’t want to get eaten. Swimmy tells them that they must make a plan, because they can’t spend their whole life hiding in the rocks. He devises a plan to have all the small red fish swim in the shape of a large fish – and then Swimmy takes his place among them in the place the eye would be. After that they are able to swim in the sea without fear – scaring the larger black tuna fish away wherever they go.
Here is the story:
I found this simple children`s story very interesting for us for the sensibilisation of all our employees with regards to what we wanted to tell and teach them. By my own experience a really good campaign for the transmission of certain fundamental messages has to be designed and kept very simple and it must go straight into the head and into the heart of the people, which You want to convince and motivate to follow such new cultural paths within Your organisation. Finally the success of such projects depends on the full understanding, acceptation and identification of all the employees of the company and not just of parcial groups or hierarchical levels within it.
During the first concept discussions with my close colaborator and friend Marco Santos, HR & Special Projects Director of Vulkan do Brasil, it came clear, that this would become a very strong and helpful cultural concept for the further development of our whole company. We made some graphic designs and when we presented our final version to our whole management team everybody bought in. This was the birthday of “Swimmy” at Vulkan do Brasil. And since then, “Swimmy” – the same as our “Swiss Clockwork” – have become omnipresent at our company and in all our internal communication. Actually the combination of both concepts “Swimmy” and the “Swiss Clockwork” gave our company culture and team spirit an enormous power.
Since the introduction of the “Swiss Clockwork” at the beginning and of “Swimmy” at the end of the year 2015 You can ask any of our 200 employees in Itatiba, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá or Mexico City and she or he will immediately and perfectly explain You the meaning of these. Our employees have meanwhile deeply assimilated these simple but very strong cultural concepts and we do not stop to refer to them during our normal everyday work activities and events. The symbols of “Swimmy” and the “Swiss Clockwork” appear on all internal presentations and are posted at many places within our company.
This whole story is all but rocket science. There is nothing really complicated about it. To be true, it`s just children`s play. And it doesn`t require any investment to implement it. But it has been incredibly helpful during the reconstruction and turnaround of our company and for the persuation of the strong growth plans which we have set up and which we are realising successfully since a couple of years – no matter the several tempory deep crisis which we had and have in our country, the Latin American region and nowadays worldwide due to Covid-19. We just walk our line…..and keep going straight forward.
None other song would fit better to this post than this one from the late great American singer, songwriter, actor and author Johnny Cash:
Hope this post and little story inspired You. Looking forward to Your comments, thoughts and own experiences. See You back here again in my blog tomorrow.
2 Responses
Thanks for sharing this Klaus, this history is an eye opener for the organization leaders that are willing to be creative and to transform companies cultures, totally agree that the message is an important point to spread to all employees.
As I said, my great friend Robson, the really important thoughts and concepts are always very simple, almost trivial. But they are so enormously strong……..