Page 2 --FLEETWOOD
When Smith took over the RV Group in 1971 Fleetwood was about a $70 million company. He said, "We were certainly not a leader in either the mobile home or RV business, although we were growing very, very rapidly at the time. The market was good for everybody. Times were good." Undeniably, Fleetwood’s growth in the RV market was a result of the leadership that Elden Smith brought to his position. His management style might be considered unorthodox by some, but the results have proven successful both for Fleetwood and Smith. He said, "I don’t spend a lot of time in this office. I am a strong believer that you don’t learn anything sitting in here. I need to be out with the people who are doing the work as much as I can, and I don’t have the time to do that as much as I would like to." Fleetwood grew very rapidly during the 1970's, and in the process built an organization that proved to be cumbersome. Smith said, "We had more overhead than we could afford to support as we went into the latter part of the 70's and the early 80's, and we found that our centralized organization was not as competitive or as quick to respond to the market place as it needed to be." Smith explained that Fleetwood reorganized its central structure to give the divisions the responsibility for decision making. "There are things going on all the time around here that I know nothing about. That’s because we have pushed those decisions down into the organization to the point that people are making decisions on a daily basis. Many companies might consider this decision making responsibility to be down to a relatively low level, but our managers are making those decisions because they have been empowered to do it and they are in the best position to do it.  "Those companies that require major product decisions and marketing decisions to come clear to the top of the organization and go back down are limited by the time and ability of an individual at the top of the organization. And ultimately, that’s going to limit opportunity to grow. What we do is set responsibility very carefully. We have specific strategic and operational plans that are set regularly and operated to. And as long as the organization is operating to those plans, everybody is perfectly free to move as quickly and as fast as they need to. They don’t need to check with me, they don’t need to check with the people that report to me in those cases." Continued
|
