Planning Priorities for Empowered Teams

The Gaines Dog Food plant in Topeka KS is built around self‐managing work teams. It opened in 1971 and has been 20% more productive than similar, traditional plants for two decades. The Procter & Gamble Co.'s Paper Products Division implemented self‐managing teams at the same time; by 1975, it knew that the division was significantly more productive than traditionally organized plants. In the mid‐1980s, AT&T's American Transtech subsidiary cut its prices to customers by 50%, then avoided layoffs, then became even more profitable by moving to more fully self‐managing teams. And tiny Litel Communications (now LCI) used teams to cut time to process a service order from two weeks to one day.