Your Career Matters
When Projects Are Shelved or Killed, Businesses Risk Losing Creative Staffers
By JOANN S. LUBLIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- In late March, Dial Corp. senior
scientist Nancy Weinmaster proudly marched into her boss's
cubicle at its windowless research center here, carrying a jar
of body butter for moisturizing skin after bathing. She had
spent five months crafting the prototype.
Now, all Ms. Weinmaster needed to move forward was
$20,000 for safety and consumer-acceptance tests on the
body butter and a related facial moisturizer. But the specialty
personal-care division where she works, beset by losses and
up for sale, lacked enough testing funds.
"Let's find the money! Let's rob Peter to pay Paul!" the
40-year-old scientist recalls begging her supervisor Mary J.
Conway. Hours later, Ms. Conway told her: "The project is on
hold because of the things going on with the business."
Similar scenes take place nowadays in countless cubicles
across America. Amid a gloomy economy, more companies
are suspending or killing promising projects to conserve cash
and reduce risk. Though they may reap short-term gains and
a stock-price boost with cost cutting, it's a dicey strategy in
other ways. Businesses risk demoralizing creative staffers
with bright ideas that might later revive corporate fortunes.
Sometimes, they lose discouraged employees altogether.
"Putting a project on hold is like putting a person's dream on
life support." suggests Susan Gebelein, an executive of
Personnel Decisions International, a Minneapolis-based
consulting firm. She estimates at least 75% of creative
wunderkinds with shelved or killed projects quit "unless that
company finds them something to get engaged in quickly,"
and with a well-defined new role.
That's easier said than done. Sunbeam
Corp. lost a vice president soon after
October budget cuts eliminated a major
project he had championed. His
complicated system for tracking retailers'
order history could have "become too
much of a financial burden for us," says Jerry Levin, chairman
and CEO of the struggling consumer-goods manufacturer in
Boca Raton, Fla.
The Sunbeam leader unsuccessfully tried to find an
alternative assignment for his lieutenant. Reassigned to his
old area, the VP lost enthusiasm. He quit in February, the
same month his employer filed for bankruptcy protection.
Once a key project gets killed, innovators "tend to move
before they recover," Mr. Levin says.
Dial could ill afford to lose project managers like Ms.
Weinmaster, even after putting her division on the block last
September in order to focus on core low-priced lines such as
soap. The division peddles higher-priced bath, body, skin and
hair-care products. Hurt by the slowing economy, too many
narrowly distributed items and high development costs, the
unit racked up 2000 pretax losses of $25 million, says
general manager Mark Whitehouse.
"We can't keep losing this kind of money," he told his troops
when he inaugurated the search for a buyer. But he soon
realized the division wouldn't fetch an attractive price unless
he simultaneously stoked key staffers' creativity to keep the
division running smoothly. "That's why we've tried to keep
everybody plugged in." So he hastened the launch of certain
items last fall -- while killing hundreds of existing ones and
halving the pace of new-product introductions this year.
In this uncertain atmosphere, Ms. Weinmaster began taking
frequent trips late last year to create the body butter and
facial moisturizer with an outside Los Angeles laboratory.
Developing products "is really like giving birth," Ms.
Weinmaster explains. "You're there at the conception and
you're there when they come into the world." Along the way,
"we get so attached to our work," she continues, spreading
her palms over six bottles of newly reformulated scrubs and
lotions.
For example, when Sno Bol Thick, the first
Dial product she helped create, hit grocers'
shelves in early 1994, the chemist
embarrassed her two young daughters by
imploring fellow shoppers at a local store to
buy the toilet cleanser. "That's Mommy's
product and Mommy's proud of it," she told
the girls.
Equally fierce pride about her latest
products made it hard for Ms. Weinmaster
to accept their arrested development. The
suspension "goes counter to what I'm
trained to do," she says. During an intense career-planning
chat with her boss last month, she said: "I want to stay
creative." Ms. Conway assured her distressed associate that
"all the work she did was very valuable and you can't take
that away."
One result: Ms. Weinmaster plunged deeper into financial
analysis, a well-funded project where she compares
new-product manufacturing costs against forecasts. "It's a
different kind of creative challenge," she says. Meanwhile,
the unit's general manager, Mr. Whitehouse, intends to ask
another Dial division to test the body butter. He also hopes
to create a company-wide product innovator post for Ms.
Weinmaster. "There's a strong need for people like Nancy,"
he says.
Like Ms. Weinmaster, Unisys Corp.'s Russ Dobbins is a
trained chemist and respected by his bosses as a creative
dynamo. But he handled a suspended project differently -- by
devising a cheaper approach.
Two years ago, the 58-year-old senior engineer seized on the
idea of adding streaming video to Unisys's intranet so the
computer services and hardware concern could expand speedy
visual communications among 37,000 employees in 54
countries. He staged a $50,000 pilot viewed by 600
colleagues world-wide, conducted a follow-up survey and got
a green light from two of his superiors.
In January 2000, Mr. Dobbins sought final approval of his
three-year, $7 million plan from Chief Information Officer
John Carrow. He made his pitch shortly before Blue Bell,
Pa.-based Unisys cut first-quarter revenue predictions and its
turnaround started to stall. Though Mr. Carrow liked the
concept of live video communication, "our capital budget
doesn't include video streaming," he told Mr. Dobbins. "Go
back and see if you can find a way to reach all of our people
instantly but for a lot less."
Disappointed, Mr. Dobbins says he "went through a few days
where I wasn't at my peak performance." He then hammered
out a five-year scheme with a $5-million tab, which he
offered to the chief information officer last June, but Mr.
Carrow still balked at the price tag. A subsequent proposal to
use streaming video as a means to slash travel costs got
shot down too.
Eventually Mr. Dobbins scaled down his plan by offering to
pursue a streaming-audio alternative. He persuaded Unisys's
satellite TV network to air its programs' sound portion over
PCs. And without pictures, he promised Mr. Carrow, "we can
do this free." Staff time would be the sole expense. That sold
the idea.
One recent afternoon, Mr. Dobbins hunched over a colleague's
PC to hear a replay of today's first full-fledged use of
streaming audio. A vice president outlined Unisys's
e-commerce efforts. Crackly music followed. "When we get to
video, [the sound] will be better," Mr. Dobbins vowed.
How can he be so sure his stalled project will ever
materialize? "I've been called a junkyard dog sometimes
because I don't let go of things that I think are a good idea,"
the Santa Claus look-alike says, blushing. Someday, he
predicts, "this project will be more important than something
else."
Write to Joann S. Lublin at joann.lublin@wsj.com