Donna Allen likes to say she’s in the business of making people feel good. As a product manager for cardmaker Gibson Greetings Inc., she packages emotions that do the talking for their buyers. Ever hear someone gasp that there’s a card for everything? That’s Donna. Since 1990, she and her colleagues at the No. 3 cardmaker have launched lines of greetings that bring cheer to women friends, co-workers, lovers, Generation Xers and, yes, pet owners.
But the last few years have been wrenching inside the company. As its markets stagnated, the company lost $28 million in 1994 and another $46 million the next year, when it threw a “for sale” sign on the door. After rejecting an offer from American Greetings in 1996, Gibson took itself off the market and brought in Frank O’Connell, of Fleer/Skybox International, a trading card company, as chief executive. Months later, O’Connell announced a new corporate strategy and brought in a herd of outsiders to shake up the sleepy Cincinnati company.
If this were all on a greeting card about Gibson, the message on the inside would read, “Are we having fun yet?”
Yet even in the face of corporate cutbacks and herky-jerky philosophical shifts, Allen has not only survived, she’s become one of the leaders of the shakeup. This, despite the fact she’s spent 12 of her 37 years at the same company.
“We’ve experienced (staff) fallout and a significant infusion of new blood, which can send the message that if you have a history here, you have no future,” Allen says of the corporate turmoil. “It’s easy to hang around with the whiners, but eventually it drags down your confidence.”
Instead, Allen took her alternative market products groups and ran. Knowing O’Connell valued creative opinions from new sources, Allen’s group went outside its usual cadre of free-lance writers and tapped a North Carolina advertising agency to help create its Ripple Effects line of Gen-X cards that helped broaden the company’s product appeal to 25-to-34-year-olds. They spent up to 75 percent more money than usual on marketing the new line to retailers. And they delivered the idea for launch in just 12 weeks, compared to the usual 12 months. “We just moved at the speed of light. . .Part of the reason for that was just to see if we could do it, because the process had become very stale. We also felt if we worked under normal deadlines, somebody might beat us to it,” Allen says.
The focus took its toll at home. One of Allen’s two young sons began acting up in school. “It’s kind of a blur for me, but for those few months, I did cheat my kids,” she recalls. A 10-day holiday with the family after the product was finished helped to repair the damage, but Allen says she still struggles with how to maintain the intensity at work without letting it kill the rest of her life. “I . . .put in extra time, but now it’s more on a crisis basis. . .Sometimes now it’s OK to go 55 (m.p.h.) and not 110.”
Gibson’s stock price now is at nearly twice its year-low level, the company projects that the Ripple Effects line will be a strong seller, it is moving fast into licensed product markets, and financial analysts are looking favorably on the company.
New top management often gets the credit for turning around a company, and the foot soldiers like Allen are often overlooked, says Renee Beatty, senior consultant at Rath & Strong Management Consultants in Lexington, Mass. The consulting firm studied about 150 workers in 30 firms undergoing organizational change and found that successful transformations had as much to do with lower-level employees’ work as they did with dynamic chief executives. Senior managers may lead change, Beatty says, but lower-level workers drive change.
Employees who made themselves indispensable during a restructuring were those that educated themselves on what skills were becoming important and then started acting without waiting for direction, she says. “The term `loose cannon’ did come up early on. The difference is that the independent thinkers checked in and trouble-shooted their own ideas instead of going off in a corner and not telling anyone what they were doing.”
Says Allen: “The important thing is to stay flexible and positive. You’re going to learn something from the experience, though you may not know what at the beginning. It doesn’t pay to hang out with the naysayers because the business is going to keep changing.”
