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Rite Solutions Case

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CASE: HR-27 DATE: 09/11/06 RITE-SOLUTIONS: MAVERICKS UNLEASHING THE QUIET GENIUS OF EMPLOYEES We freely acknowledge that we are not the two smartest people in the company... . Weíve got a lot of real world experience. Weíve got a vision of where we want this thing to be at some point in time. But exactly how to get there, and what technologies to use, and how we should employ them, thatís much bigger than any two people should be responsible for. ó Jim Lavoie, CEO of Rite-Solutions, speaking of himself and company President Joe 1 Marino In July 2006, Susan Duncan attended a workshop at Rite-Solutions to learn more about an innovative tool that the company had developed to foster innovation, and to encourage collaboration among …show more content…

Lavoie was a creative, visionary thinker. Marino had an excellent attention to detail, and was a strong operations manager. Equally important, they each recognized their own limitations, valued the othersí strengths, were good friends, and had an exceptional working relationship. They did not want to start a conventional company. Marino explained, ìafter leaving a company with thousands of employees, we started the company with the idea that thereís got to be a better way to do business in the 21st centuryÖ . [We decided that] if weíre going to do this, if weíre going to start a business at our age, and at this point in life, then itís going to be one big experimentó[weíre going to] do all those things that we always wanted to do as managers of a public company.î He continued: It also takes a lot of pressure off of the top two guns if you freely admit to people that this is one big experiment, and we really donít know where itís going. But we do promise [to employees] that weíre not going to do anything that will jeopardize your wellbeing. These people have families. Itís not like weíre a bunch of cowboys. But thereís a certain liberation that goes along with saying that weíre going to try some stuffósome things will work, some things arenít going to work. We actually have a model for it, things that we canít mess around with that might interfere with peoplesí lives. But thereís a piece of the business that we purposely break every once in awhile to say, ëLetís

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