A man born into power, money and a red-carpet welcome into the family business, if he`s really smart, promptly delivers a blue-ribbon job performance and humbly dons sack cloth when the kudos are handed out.
Shedding the prove-yourself baggage that could derail plans to turn a birthright opportunity into an outright success was Richard ”Dick” Hansen`s first order of business November, 1965, when he joined the executive ranks of Furnas Electric Company, Batavia, as the third-generation, handpicked successor of inventor-founder W. Carl Furnas.
”I came in fully recognizing that most people looked upon me as the silver-spoon kid,” said Hansen, 54. ”So I knew for a long period of time I had to work longer, harder, do more, prove myself, give all the credit and take none for years to create a peer support group.”
Jim Hansen, Dick`s younger brother, who is an industrial designer and owns a consulting business in Chicago, recalled discussing the problem: ”I told Dick that it`s difficult to be where you are because of who you are. The upside is that you got there. The downside is you don`t know if you would have gotten there on your own.”
Today Dick Hansen`s entrepreneurial signature is scrawled all over the seven-plant manufacturing matrix that in 1991 employed 1,500 and produced $115 million worth of what he calls ”electro-mechanical mousetraps,” industrial- strength widgets that control the flow of electric power to equipment, usually motors. That compares to the pre-Hansen era, one-factory company that reported a record-year revenue of $9 million in 1965.
Furnas competes with international multibillion-dollar manufacturing giants by selecting market niches that match its ability to make specialized products, a strategy that gets high praise from competitors such as Square D in Palatine. ”Furnas has focused on not trying to be a supplier of all things to all people,” said Robert Fiorani, Square D director of corporate communications. ”Any company that competes with Furnas has a quality competitor.”
A locked strategic planning room is just footsteps away from Hansen`s office. It has a Spartan, almost military, quality. There is a big circular table, a huge TV monitor and not a sheet of paper in sight. It looks like a war room. ”We were going to call it that,” said Hansen, and he`s not kidding.
When the final chapter on his brother`s corporate reign is written, history will liberate Dick Hansen from his silver-spoon stigma, brother Jim predicted. ”He got there because of who he was, but he stayed there because of what he is.
”He`s tenacious as hell. He certainly doesn`t suffer from a not-invented-here philosophy. He very much has his ego in check. And he`s fiercely loyal to his people.”
Dick Hansen said the only reason he agreed to be interviewed was because
”I hope the story will make our employees proud of where they work.”
If that`s all he wanted then he need not have bothered talking to a reporter. Employees informally surveyed said the reason a succession of elections to unionize the plants have failed is because Furnas has an employee-relations track record that outperforms what they expect from an employer, even a unionized employer. (The other six plants, located in West Chicago; Morrison, Ill.; Iowa; Massachusetts; Canada and Mexico are also not unionized.)
”This company has done more for me than any other person here,” said Warren Johnson, group leader of the maintenance department. ”In 1975, after I`d worked here for about two years, I got into some law trouble for robbery and got a three-year prison term. Dick Hansen appeared in court as a character witness for me. Dick Hansen sent letters of encouragement when I was gone (in prison). He told me he had a job waiting for me when I got out.
”He kept his word. The day I was released, March 1, 1979, I had my job back. I`ve never been laid off, and I was promoted to group leader two years ago. Many times I`ve walked into the president`s (Dick Hansen`s) office; his door is always open.”
Dorothy Herndon, 72, who received the Furnas President`s Award for 1991 after 19 years on the job, said she has no plans to retire. She traces her feelings of core-deep loyalty to the company back to the time she learned that her husband had only six months to live.
”Eleven years ago, I walked out the day I heard the news that he had cancer,” she said. ”I walked back in six months later, I was given the same job back. The company didn`t have to do that.”
A tour of the Batavia plant with Hansen doubles for a walk down memory lane. He kicked his toe at a concrete strip in the tool and die room and laughed: ”This is where I used to roller skate.” His childhood home was only a block and a half from the plant and a visit to the factory seemed as normal as going to Grandpa`s house. But that`s about as far as normal went when Furnas and his young protege got together.
”Most little kids (have) grandfathers who sit down and tell them about little bunny rabbits,” said Hansen, ”When he and I sat down, he told me what coal was and its importance in making steel, how electricity was generated, why it`s used, how it`s used, what form it takes and why motors work. It was fascinating.”
Furnas gave his grandson his first job when he was 15, in the maintenance department ”cleaning lavatories and cleaning out pipes,” said Hansen. Other dirty-hands summer jobs at the plant punctuated his college years at Purdue University. ”I could still surprise a toolmaker,” he boasted. ”I could go in and set up a lathe, bore a hole and cut threads inside a piece of metal.” As an adolescent, Hansen said, he was ”a hell raiser.” With a shrug and a Cheshire cat smile, he offered a description of his activities that he figured was self-explanatory: ”Cars and girls.” Stories abound (confirmed by Jim Hansen) of Dick and Jim racing a rebuilt post-war model Jeep up hills at a sand and gravel pit near town.
William ”Bill” Lisman, who became an interim president after Carl Furnas died, remembers asking Hansen why he didn`t participate in high school team sports. ”Dick said that he figured he couldn`t win, and he`d be embarrassed,” he recalled.
Hansen, who described himself as ”a red, white and blue, John Wayne guy,” came to Furnas carrying, in one hand, a baccalaureate degree with a major in industrial management and a minor in engineering, and, in the other hand, a demolished dream of becoming a Navy pilot.
His scrapped his plan to attend flight school when his grandfather died in January 1962, followed six months later by the death of his mother, Helen, from cancer. Gilbert Hansen, Dick`s father and Carl Furnas`s` son-in-law, who had been expected to succeed Furnas, died in a rafting accident in 1957.
Hansen, then a Navy officer aboard a tanker, got a transfer and finished out his military tour with a desk job at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Waukegan. After he was discharged from the Navy, he spent a year at a factory near Dusseldorf, Germany, in an exchange program for young managers. It was an apprenticeship that allowed him to learn the executive ropes and experiment with technologies without future subordinates looking over his shoulder.
When he returned to Batavia, Hansen`s self-mandated job description could be summed up in just two words: ”sell change.”
The benevolent-dictator management style of his grandfather was a dinosaur, he decided. Hansen believed in consensus management, ”because when anything is a success, the people who make it a success have to believe it`s their success.”
He made the change more palatable by trying to relieve employees of their natural reluctance to take risks and expose themselves to the embarrassment of error. In the new world according to Hansen, mistakes were seen as the harbinger to progress.
”A lot of people don`t like change. I love it,” he said. ”Change for many people is threatening, when, in fact, if they take away all their (fear), it`s really invigorating, challenging, exciting.” But change alone is not invigorating, challenging or exciting enough to fill Hansen`s emotional dance card. He goes for The Rush.
Hansen likes to move fast and play to win. Whether he`s racing vintage cars, flying in air shows or working on a new project, ”don`t get in his way,” advises Joanne Hansen, his wife of 28 years. ”Let him spin through; I think of him as a kind of whirling dervish.”
Hansen operates at a mental cruising speed of about mach 2. When he gets an idea, he has a tendency to be ”a little bit impetuous,” allowed Hansen. But he counts on his trusted managers to ”throttle back” proposals that
”need the edges chopped off them.”
When he wanted to take advantage of a 1979 license to use NASA energy-saving technology and create a new line of industrial motor controllers, he set up a separate company adjacent to the plant and funded it with about $400,000 in venture capital. He named the company Nordic Controls in honor of his Norwegian ancestry.
Hansen feared if he tried to do the research and development at Furnas, the project would run into ”inhibiting corporate culture.” Nordic is now a division of Furnas.
The same undertaking would be handled very differently today thanks to some ideas borrowed from Japanese manufacturers. Unlike American companies that pay homage to Japanese management techniques with nice sounding slogans, Hansen put them into practice. And he has pulled out all the stops for his current pet project: concurrent engineering.
He has bet his credibility and reputation within his own organization that the project will redesign a major Furnas product line in less than half the time (two years) it would take to get the job done under the traditional product development system. Modeled on a Japanese system of engineering, the project is staffed by a multidisciplinary team.
Both Nordic and the concurrent engineering project were entrusted to Dennis Walstad, senior vice president of engineering and technology development. The project is expected to revolutionize the way Furnas develops new products, Walstad explained: ”It`s important that this project is successful because one of our objectives is to continue to work to change our culture. One way to do that is to make the first experiment a big, big success.”
Concurrent engineering, as explained by Walstad, appears to be the common-sense way to design almost anything that requires a team larger than one person: ”With concurrent engineering, the manufacturing engineer works side-by-side with the designer and the other people on the team (quality engineers, assemblers, marketing and sales specialists) who criticize the design on a daily basis. In the old, old days, the engineer would design something and then ship the drawings to the manufacturing department and wish them luck.”
Eventually the people from quality control, marketing and sales would get into the act and want changes made to the design. Before it was all over, the product, a high-tech hodgepodge of what manufacturers call over-the-wall engineering, had been reinvented over and over and over.
Hansen has rewritten company policy to ensure that this program doesn`t get torpedoed by ”hidden agendas and interdepartmental jealousies,” he said. In short, the project manger has tremendous clout. Not only does Walstad have unrestricted authority to claim any company resources and personnel at his sole discretion, but the job performance evaluations for salary raises of employees borrowed from other departments carry the weight of the office of the company president.
Working on a concurrent engineering team ”is like returning to the culture of a smaller company,” said Walstad. ”Development starts this way in a small company. Everybody works together and they have a shared vision. But as companies grow into big companies, territories develop. And with all the separate power bases to contend with, the ability to work together gets lost.” The project, which started last July, is already a month ahead of schedule.
Empowering others to create change is an ongoing Hansen mission. In 1984, he wanted to provide a forum for groups of workers to use their experience and imaginations to solve problems. Their reward was fast action on their recommendations.
The Japanese call the groups quality circles. At Furnas the program is called EPICS, an acronym for Employee Participation In Customer Satisfaction. Today there are 22 EPICS teams. In practice, it means workers who see a better way to make Furnas products can make things happen. Hansen once walked into an EPICS meeting and signed a $60,000 requisition on the spot to purchase two machines the group said it needed.
”EPICS is almost like a union because you have a voice,” said Pam Feyereisen, a quality assurance inspector and an EPICS team member. ”On top of that, you have a way to make changes. It`s a force for change. And its a tool for (boosting) morale, because you can see things getting done.”
His ego doesn`t get in the way of delegating his power to others, Hansen said, because flying is all the ego boost he needs.
”He`s a pilot`s pilot,” said Dick Perry, a retired United Airlines pilot, who has flown for nearly 20 years with Hansen in each other`s private planes. Hansen, Perry and two other pilots fly in a diamond formation in vintage staggerwing Beechcraft biplanes at the annual Oshkosh, Wis., air show. ”Many professional pilots would envy his ability,” said Perry. ”When Dick goes after something, he doesn`t do it little by little. He dives in completely until he masters it. He targets something and then heads for it straight on.”
That`s how Hansen made his dream flight. After 14 years of alternately dreaming and planning, in 1987 he took a jaunt in his `50s model twin Beechcraft over the North Atlantic, from Newfoundland to Greenland, with additional hops to Iceland, Norway and Dusseldorf, where he kept an old promise ”to fly my own aircraft over and see them (friends at the factory where he apprenticed).”
”I`d go around the world with him,” said Marge Gorman of Mansfield, Ohio. She and her husband, Jim, shared the copilot duties with Hansen on the trip. Not even bad weather and icing conditions caused Hansen to depart from his ”organized, methodical and calm” flight persona, she said.
”It wasn`t a risk-free trip,” Hansen said, allowing that there was a constant scary element to the whole thing. ”Going across the ice cap of Greenland was a little frightening, because if we lost an engine we were going to become a permanent part of that ice cap.”
When Dick first talked about making the North Atlantic flight, Joanne dismissed the idea as off the wall. But she should have known better, she said: ”I`ve learned that when he starts talking about something, no matter how obscure it may seem, its going to be a reality within 10 years.”
On the credenza in Hansen`s office is a sign that reads ”Furnas Electric Company is not for sale.” His answer to numerous would-be buyers is thanks but no thanks. Furnas will stay family-owned, Hansen insisted. ”My goal is to beat the averages and go another generation.”
That doesn`t necessarily mean that his son, Scott Hansen, 27, who has been working at Furnas for two years as a sales engineer, is the heir apparent to the president`s job, said Hansen. (Scott owns company stock and, at the very least, will likely be on the board of directors, Dick said. Daughter Lisa, 23, works for a DeKalb computer company and has no direct involvement with Furnas.) ”The best person to head this up has to head it up … 1,500 people (employees) deserve the best leader.”
There seems to be no shortage of contenders. Asked if he wants to be the next president of Furnas, Walstad said, ”If it were offered, I`d take it.”
Scott Hansen gave an identical response. ”I`m working toward getting the respect of my peers so some day if that position is open to me, I`ll have their support.”
As he continued speaking, the son became a mirror image of the father.
(”The apple didn`t fall far from the tree,” said Joanne Hansen of her son.) If he does get the job, Scott said he wants to change a few things: He would introduce ”a little different product line,” and Nordic and Furnas operations would be more consolidated. ”My Dad didn`t have outside selling experience. I will have,” said Scott.
Politics would be a great profession ”in my next life,” quipped Dick.
Looks like he may get an early start.
