Question: The Power of Bill Fowler at Blackmer/Dover Resources
Blackmer/Dover Resources' plant makes heavy-duty pumps designed to move commodities such as refined oil and chocolate. The plant has 160 employees. Historically, management assigned employees to operate the same machine for months or even years at a time. In this way, each employee became intimately familiar with a narrow task. And employees used their expertise to earn more money. Until 1997, about half the workforce at the plant earned a premium, on top of their hourly wages, based on the number of pumps or pump parts they produced. The old system gave them a strong incentive to conceal outputenhancing tricks they had learned, even from co-workers Today, the plant's employees receive a straight hourly wage. To make the plant more flexible, management encourages workers to learn a variety of jobs and accept moves to different parts of the factory floor. Many of the plant's older employees, however, have not welcomed the change. One of those is Bill Fowler. Fowler is 56 years old and has worked at the Blackmer plant for 24 years. Fowler does not like changing jobs and he does not like telling anyone anything about what he does.
"I don't want to move around," he says, "because I love my routine-it helps me get through the day." Fowler's job is cutting metal shafts for industrial pumps. It's a precision task: A minor error could render a pump useless. Fowler is outstanding at what he does. He is known for the accuracy of his cuts. His bosses also say he can be hours faster than anyone else in readying his giant cutting machines to shift from making one type of pump shaft to another. Management would love to incorporate Fowler's know-how into the manufacturing process, but he refuses to share his secrets even with fellow workers. "If I gave away my tricks, management could use [them] to speed things up and keep me at a flat-out pace all day long," says Fowler. Employees like Fowler worry when they read about companies soliciting employees' expert advice in the name of making their plants more competitive, and then turn around and move jobs to lower-wage locations abroad. Blackmer's top management, however, says they have no plans to relocate jobs or otherwise hurt workers. They merely want to pool employees' knowledge to make the plant stronger. "We've realized that to get competitive, we need to start asking these guys what they know," says Blackmer's president.
1. Explain Bill Fowler's behaviour in power terms.
2. What, if anything, does this case say about trust and power?
3. What does this case say regarding implementing knowledge-management systems?
4. What, if anything, can management do to change Fowler's behaviour?