A Glove Story

In The Heart of Change, John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen reproduce a story (‘Gloves on the Boardroom Table’) told by Jon Stegner, most probably the CEO of his company. He was concerned about the wasteful purchase practices he had observed in his company with several plants in multiple locations in the US. He was convinced that reforming the purchase procedures would save something like $1 billion in five years. He was also certain that this would not happen unless a large number of people, especially those at the top of the organization, changed their mind set.

But he didn’t give up. Instead of making PowerPoint presentations about the wasteful purchase practices in the company, he quietly asked one of his summer interns to study how many different kinds of gloves the company was buying and how much it was paying for each. This was one item that all the company’s factories were using in large numbers.

The student did a thorough job. She found that all the factories put together were buying 424 different kinds of gloves. She collected a sample each and put on it a tag that displayed the price the factory was paying to its supplier for it. When the project was over, it was discovered that one factory would pay as little as $5 for a pair of gloves and another factory as much as $17 for the same kind of gloves.

One day, Stegner had the 424 pairs of gloves sorted by which factory they came from, and displayed along with the price tags in the company’s boardroom. Then he invited all the division presidents to visit the boardroom. They couldn’t believe their eyes. They walked around the large table shaking their heads. They looked again and again at the gloves from their own factory. They could see for themselves the wide variation in the prices they were paying for the same gloves.

Stegner adds that it’s one rare event when no one had anything to say. They just bought the idea that the purchase procedures in the company had to be revamped.

Stegner followed this up with the travelling roadshow featuring the display of these gloves. It was sent to every division and every plant. With this he persuaded a large number of managers in his company to rethink radically the way they were buying not just gloves but other things too.

***      ***      ***

Words are no doubt powerful in the game of persuasion. Clever use of words can frame proposals in a way that overcomes the target’s resistance. But words can rarely match the power of action, of demonstration, to wow the target. We need to ask ourselves if don’t often take the easy route of talk rather than action and demonstration when we are faced with challenging persuasion tasks. If we try smart, we may be able to come up with something dramatic even in apparently hopeless situations.