‘Those three men,’ said he, ‘have carried into space all the resources of art, science, and industry. With that, one can do anything; and you will see that, some day, they will come out all right.’ (Jules Verne,From the Earth to the Moon)
The Entrepreneurs: Ed Voeten, Raoul Voeten and Nico van Putten
The case of Bradford starts as a family business in 1984. One could say that the original founder, Ed Voeten, had the profile of a true engineer. The love for the perfection of the product sometimes made him forget that the cus- tomer matters or that its employees had their professional limitations.
Raoul, his son and successor, said:
It was a specific kind of entrepreneurship that really fitted the small size Bradford had in those days. The masculine dominance of the leader was also the type of leadership that was quite common back then. One did not expect some- thing else from an entrepreneur in society; neither in our company nor at the other side of the table at the seat of the customer.
It appeared difficult for Ed Voeten to adapt to the other role that was expected of the entrepreneur in the second phase of the company, the lift- off: the role of director or coordinator. In his original role model he inspired many employees to do as he did: to show personal excellence. And some continue to do so even today. This role–values cooperation is about how and when the individual will communicate with the team, and preferably not the other way around – how the team inspires the individual. At the same time, this original strength was needed again and again to ensure the unavoidable revolutionary changes in market orientation. One could say that in the first 10 years the company was controlled according to the cultural framework – intentions, beliefs and values – as initiated by the founder. The type of cooperation that developed from this was not only
applicable for the internal affairs but also for the contacts with third parties, like customers and suppliers.
In 1994, partly because of health problems, Ed Voeten relinquished control to his two children, with Raoul Voeten as the executive director/owner. In 2001, Nico van Putten started working as a financial director. Raoul and Nico are quite explicit about their complementarity in co-direction: ‘We do not differ that much in character, it is our background that is different. We both have the same kind of drive to make the best out of it, although neither of us is ever thinking in extremes’. The co-direction from 2001 illustrates how complementary characters can lead to a very powerful development of the ‘span of innovation’. It offered the manage- ment the possibility not just to be a part of the bandwagon compared to competitors, but also to create new market combinations building on their own strengths. They could also have more confidence in how to restructure the internal organization to fit future needs. The succession of control from the founder brings up the question of legitimacy. There will always be supervisors or employees who only recognize the leadership of the founder.
It is like getting married again – the children can make life hard for the new parents. In fact this is exactly what Raoul and Nico felt and expressed in their words during the interview. It illustrates that cracking the founder’s 20-year-old code is not that easy. Raoul expressed this in the following way:
At first I was simply working as an employee at Bradford. At that time I fre- quently heard emotional cries such as ‘If only Ed Voeten was able to listen to the company!’ After I took over control I was often confronted with the opposite:
‘If only your father was still here.’ Somehow this makes me feel kind of relaxed about the emotional dimension in our community.
From 2002 to 2003, the company faced some major problems concern- ing the need to match new competences with the existing ones among the personnel. Experts with other national backgrounds had been hired, and these appeared to have a stronger attitude to work compared to many of the Dutch personnel who had joined Bradford earlier. These movements also revealed some inconsistencies in work attitudes and remuneration.
All this was temporarily counterproductive in terms of cooperation. One could say that the original start-up team have been succeeded by several generations, each with their own ideas about work, quality and feelings towards the customer. The original start-up team finds it hard to cope with the structural changes that are needed to adapt to the chang- ing market context, while the newer generation of employees has know- ledge only about the current situation. This creates a whole new dynamics in the Bradford community as the more feminine aspiration and
satisfaction levels of the newer generations do not match those of the original team.
Now the question is, how can various generations create the conditions for cooperation? The inspiration of the individual talent can now develop as a
‘product’ of shared beliefs, which means that the management has to reflect on the pluriformic context of the community as a whole, in relation to the outside world. As Raoul and Nico said: ‘At first we were not taken too seri- ously by the outside world. Then people started to think we had plain luck.
Only lately do we get the feedback that we are seen as a professional duo’.
The Dynamics of the Bradford Community
When we take a closer look at the evolution of Bradford as an enterprise, one aspect becomes immediately obvious: the dynamics between the family character and the growth to a more open and complex organizational struc- ture. The first steps were realized when Ed Voeten relinquished control to his son and to his colleague, Nico van Putten. One aspect to ‘reform’ was the ‘amateuristic love’ for product development towards a form of more professional process and product management. We shall now analyse the Bradford community by describing several paradoxes that become visible in the critical incidents as experienced in the Bradford community. A paradox can be defined as a seemingly contradictory situation.
1. Creativity and solidarity A strength of the Bradford community is per- sonal creativity. At the same time, a striking common ground between the employees – a feeling of solidarity – can also be experienced. How do these relate to each other? How is the transfer of innovation from the individual to the community expressed? There must be unwritten rules to enable this process, which have the character of a kinship system, like the maverick that is allowed to roam as long as itfinds water when it is needed. It is important to know and understand such rules in order to cherish the creativity process and understand how relations add up to effective cooperation. In this respect one could say that there is hierarchy at Bradford but still within the limits of an organization of profession- als. What does all this tell us about cooperation? From the sociological viewpoint, without intensive cooperation the community of practice at Bradford would not have been able to make the frame-breaking changes in product market positions that they have done several times already.
2. Partnerships with clients The community at Bradford knows how to communicate with the customer. In fact they have the competence to develop the interaction with the customer into a process of ‘mutual aid’. For decades now, the teamwork of the community members with
customers forms a keystone of the innovation process. It is a necessary virtue to build trust in a hostile and competitive market. Oddly enough, the various internal players in the service chain – development, pro- duction and aftersales – seem to act with a consistent set of beliefs, with some representatives of a generation that are less committed to this process. The commitment in the value chain for the customer has many properties of the ‘high-commitment’ community. It certainly cannot be forced by the military hierarchy. Here, some unwritten ‘causal chain’ of beliefs might explain this behaviour; this is the type of belief that could be induced by the role model of the founder.
3. Leadership and followers The Bradford management faces a difficult dilemma. Should the family values of the founder be cherished? Or does the development of a professional organization need to stimulate another dimension? In terms of the military organization, the question can be formulated as: how can the hierarchical skills of middle man- agement be improved? A dilemma would force the managers to choose between these two. And the choice of one would imply the negative effect of the other as a free gift. Maybe it is just a paradox. The metaphor of the ‘tent’ might integrate the opposites: the value chain can be seen as a journey where people are floating freely, being attracted and repelled by each other at the same time and the tent – the organization – is only a temporary shelter.
4. Responsibility for profit and towards the wider society These days a company is seen as a multi-goal assignment: management is supposed to bridge investment in People and capital, Profit and the interests of the Planet (PPP). In the aerospace industry this is not an easy task.
Here it is important to be aware of the specific responsibilities of man- agement and employees. Management is supposed to communicate about the ‘next practice’, and employees are supposed not to wait until they hear about it. It requires a dialogue to transform this into a posi- tive spiral. An interesting aspect is the relation of the employee that is confronted with different interests at work and at home. On an indi- vidual basis this also appears to be a vital relationship that is somewhat tense in terms of expectations.
The above paradoxes can be analysed using the Nisbet framework, pre- sented in the previous section. In the first instance we have taken the various intentions, examples and activities at face value and tried to label them in terms of the three types of community. Table 2.2 summarizes these initial results.
The results could be interpreted as a transformation from a family to a military state metaphor. However, the analysis also offers many loose ends
that would not fit in such a metamorphosis. In a third interview with Raoul Voeten and Nico van Putten this was discussed further. It appeared that for them, the elements that fit in the military state community are merely seen as a means to make the organization act more like a professional organ- ization instead of an organization of professionals. The other loose end was that the community is dominantly driven by the values of the customer, which does not automatically relate to the kinship or the military state com- munity. This is more like a natural property of the high-commitment community. The conclusion can be that Bradford is and will be first and foremost a kinship community. Here it would be interesting to see how the members of the Bradford community experience the intentions of the directors. The trend that many small companies make the transition from a family-like community to the anonymity of the military state community can serve as a mirror that can easily be looked into by the average employee or a work council. In the case of Bradford it would be a pitfall in the quest for a pluralistic community where the interests of directors and employees can stay rooted in common ground. In the context of the structural growth, Bradford is aiming to develop an interesting and kaleidoscopic dialogue that will emerge between directors and employees in the years to come. The myth of Bradford might then enter its third phase.
The Interaction between Entrepreneurs and Community
With the analysis so far we have gained insight into how the directors behave and the patterns of cooperation in the community of practice. This subsection will look at the interaction between the directors and the Table 2.2 Overview of possible attributes of the Bradford community
Kinship community Military state community
Basic Family owned Family owned, professionally
structure controlled
Member Manager and employee: I feel I belong to a division like a family member
Transition over Founder sets tradition and Breaking with tradition;
generations explains the codified life rules efficiency, construct new rules Perspective of Non-competitive community Competition in a professional progress of professionals organization: you can and
should win your place Status Your know-how belongs here Show that your know-how
belongs here
community of practice. The relation between Ed Voeten and his employ- ees was a very dynamic one in the sense of personal interaction. After Raoul’s succession, the pattern of interaction changed rapidly. First, because Raoul intends to rely on the expertise of the employee much more than his father, he is inclined to trust that the employee will do the job properly, even with the risk that this can work out wrongly. The new control element that Nico van Putten initiated was to align responsibilities and workflows. Planning the work on the basis of a yearly forecast was quite new, and many of the older generation still have to get used to it and might experience this as growing bureaucracy. While the organization was growing in all respects it is obvious that more professional tools of control were needed. In these conditions, the role of middle management becomes more important. While Raoul and Nico do not see middle management as
‘clones’ of themselves, they struggle with the question of how the compe- tence of supervisors can be further developed. In the past few years, the two directors have managed to interact with the supervisors and employ- ees in a rather fluid and open way, to take the company to a next stage of development. Of course, this goes hand in hand with rational or emotional ups and downs that stem from individual preferences of employees, lead- ership issues of supervisors, differences in expectations of the various gen- erations of employees or the changing preferences of customers.
In terms of interaction we really can see a pluralistic community on the move at Bradford, like the metaphor of the tent as described above. At the high-tech venture in aerospace Bradford, entrepreneurship is built on cooper- ation in a threefold interactive way: the entrepreneurs stimulate cooperation in the community; the various generations in the community are orientated towards internal cooperation by nature, and both express a cooperative drive towards the customer in the institutional context. Where Taylor (1913) once enriched organizational effectiveness with rules on division of labour and terms like ‘span of control’, now another concept is dawning, the span of inno- vation. This can be defined as the ability to stimulate, design, control and eval- uate innovation processes. While the span of control is mainly task orientated, the span of innovation is based on human relations. Cooperation can be seen as a powerful driver to enlarge the span of innovation of a company.
Relational Patterns that Make the Difference
The analysis of the Bradford case leads to an evaluation of the four basic relations:
1. The relation between the (un)conscious motivations of the founder and the engineer/entrepreneur, and the expectations of the employees have
developed from an intuitive way of working in a situation where differences in expectation over generations become visible. Where the founder had a rather unconscious motivation with related problems in communication, the present duo of entrepreneurs is more able to put their unconscious drives into words, communicate about it and work on conditions to make a dialogue feasible.
2. For some 10 years the relation between the persons inside the company, acting as a community, has been based on trust within the family of insiders. Gradually this type of trust is changing into a kind of condi- tional trust, with varying expectations over generations.
3. The relation between the working community towards the business environment is based on a sound mutual challenge. Here, there is an explicit orientation in external reference towards the customer.
4. The relation of the working community towards other parts of the human society is of a hybrid character. The management intends to combine profitability with societal spin-offs, within a framework of small margins, while the personnel are struggling with the differences in belief systems at work and at home, frequently leading to work–home conflicts.
The analysis of these relations leads to the conclusion that from the view- point of the engineer/entrepreneur, cooperation can enlarge his/her span of innovation. For the employees, cooperation can be interesting because it confirms their membership in the community and the appraisal of their individual competences. Cooperation over generations can stimulate the learning process, under the condition that the participants in the learning process have the intention to develop in a community that has pluriformic properties. In this more feminine-orientated business context, the individ- ual participants will be able more than ever to contribute to their own myth of a small company that is able to show a steady growth under competitive and complex market conditions.