49. [John] Strazzanti is president of Com-Corp Industries, a $13 million, 100-employee metal-stamping shop he incorporated in Cleveland in 1980. He’d started out as a machine operator with a tool-and-die manufacturer, rapidly climbing the ladder to become general manager of another stamping company. Along the way, he didn’t just dream about what he’d change if he were a company president. He figured out ways to make his dreams a reality.

[Dateline Cleveland, 1977] Packie Presser was vice president of the notoriously demanding local chapter of the teamsters’ union. The chapter controlled a metal-stamping plant where Strazzanti had just been promoted from floor supervisor to general manager. Strazzanti recalls:

Two coworkers marched into my office. It was a hot summer day; they had had a few beers at lunch and were fired up. They worked hard in the warehouse and saw the engineers working in the air-conditioning and getting paid a lot more. They didn’t think it was fair and wanted more money. I knew I was in a no-win situation. If I told them I thought they were being paid fairly, that’s what they expected; they were going to argue, and they weren’t going to be happy with the results. If I gave them more money, I was being unfair to everybody else.

So I took out a legal pad and I told them to write down whatever they wanted to be paid. Thirty days from that date, they would get that pay—with one caveat.

During the 30 days, I would shop for replacements for them. If I could get highly qualified people to work for anything less than that number, they would have to take a hike. They asked for time to think about it and never came back with a number.

A lot of these guys think that if a company fills an order for a million dollars, it earns a million dollars in profit. I realized that if workers understood how a company earned a profit and how it had to be competitive, a lot of the resentment between managers and employees could be eliminated. And they needed to understand that if they improved their job skills, they could receive a higher wage.

SOURCE: Anonymous, “If I Were President. . . ,” Inc. (April 1995) pp. 56–61. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center.

a. How does the sharing of information in an organization contribute to the empowerment of employees in a decentralized organizational structure to enhance their performance and that of the organization?

b. In a decentralized organization, how does the sharing of information allow employees to better understand their organizational roles relative to the roles of others?

c. In a decentralized organization, how does quality control depend on widespread distribution of information?