Fast Company Article, December 1998

Great Harvests Recipe For Growth by Heath Row

Can Extension learn from a bread company?

This article wasnt very long, so I almost passed it by, but because I love breads, I decided to read it anyway and to my surprise it had great revelations for me!

The article told about how the Great Harvest Bread Company looked at itself as a university by creating a community of learning. The company had expanded to 130 bakeries in 34 states not by having a great bread recipe (although Im sure that helped), but by having a recipe for innovation-driven growth. Great Harvest wanted to open more stores and so like most companies decided to sell franchises. But unlike most other franchises, Great Harvest did not impose top-down regulations to make stores standardized; instead it promoted localized innovation and encouraged fast learning.

Tom McMakin, the companys chief operation officer stated that "were a bread company, but were also a university. Were creating a community of learning. A network of equal participants doing similar things will generate lots of new ideas and produce a big competitive advantage for the whole company.

Their first principle of growth at Great Harvest is  expansion comes from experimentation. And I love this  its mission statement opens with a call to "Be loose and have fun." New owners do not have a regulations book they have to abide by, but instead there is an operating manual that details best practices. Owners run their bakeries as they see fit with only one condition  that they share what they have learned along the way with other owners in the company. This style gives the stores a "mom and pop" feel, which goes great with fresh bread!

The second principle of growth is that owners make the best teachers. When someone buys a new franchise/opens a new bakery, they travel to company headquarters for a week-long session on how to bake bread and run a small business. The headquarters staff teaches some of the sessions, but an experienced owner is always on hand to act as a role model. And then comes the real education  the new owner visits two franchises in different parts of the country. As McMakin says "Experience is the mother of expertise. New owners learn more from their peers than they do from bureaucrats. I dont own a bakery. I sit at a desk." The reason for visiting two bakeries  to see that they dont do things the same way  allowing owners the freedom to choose what works best for them.

Great Harvest wants to keep their owners learning, so the training doesnt stop there. After six months, the new store owners get a visit from the owner of an established store. The company says it spends most of its money trying to connect owners  not to generate ideas at the headquarters. McMakin says "There is just something magical about two owners  two people who do the same thing  standing next to each other, talking and learning: Heres someone looking for knowledge; heres someone sharing it at the right moment." The company has also set up company wide Intranet to help the owners communicate and about 80% of the owners communicate regularly via email.

In relation to my work in Extension and my being critical of administration for their lack of training for new educators before they "throw them to the wolves"  the article may have changed my thinking a bit. After I read this article, I am more convinced that there should be something for new employees right away  as those of us who have been around know, the position description they use for hiring sure doesnt give much guidance. Most of the position descriptions are so general that you could do almost anything  yes it is nice that our boundaries are broad, but for most they are so broad that they dont give any clues as to where to even start! For most new hires, is a bit overwhelming to say the least! So if we used the model that Great Harvest uses, it would mean a general orientation on campus  then, spending time on site with two different educators to see how they do their job on a day to day basis. Just like McMakin said  "two people who do the same thing  standing next to each other  talking and learning." And then after the new hire has been on the job a while, a check-up visit from an experienced Educator. Sounds like mentoring to me!

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the teaching and the learning should be from Educator to Educator  again back to the principle that "owners make the best teachers". We are owners of our programs and we do all work in different ways to accomplish the same thing  educating!

When sharing this with a coworker, he agreed that this model for training sound much better than the system when he started in Extension, which consisted of training mainly by administrators and people on campus. In visiting with some of my cohorts on this topic, we have talked about how learning from someone doing the actual job makes a lot more sense and that doing it through a mentoring program would be ideal.

-- Anonymous, February 04, 1999