Article location:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/30/usmint.

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December 19, 2007
Tags: Technology, Innovation, Management, Organizational change

Mint Condition
By Anna Muoio

Philip N. Diehl makes change -- literally. As director of the United States Mint, he and his
colleagues produce roughly 20 billion circulating coins per year -- those nickels, dimes, and
quarters that jingle in your pockets and feed parking meters. They also manufacture and sell
collectibles, commemoratives, and bullion coins. With annual revenues of $2.5 billion, 2,200
employees, and four manufacturing plants, the Mint makes money by making money.

More important, Philip Diehl knows how to make change -- deep-seated, far-reaching, this-
feels-like-a-different-place kind of change. When he took charge of the Mint in September
1994, the agency lived up to every negative stereotype of a government bureaucracy. It was
inefficient, slow moving, and utterly clueless about the standards of performance in the
business world. One telling example: The Mint's primary responsibility is to keep an
adequate supply of coins in circulation on behalf of its main customer, the Federal Reserve
System. But six years ago, no one at the Mint could tell you how many coins were in its
inventory.

Not that many Mint officials thought it was a big problem. Diehl remembers his first visit to
the agency's headquarters, shortly after he was appointed by President Clinton. "I got to the
building a little after 5 PM, and the hallways were empty. There wasn't a person in sight. I
actually called my wife and told her that there must have been a bomb scare; but there wasn't.
It was just business as usual at this sleepy, 201-year-old government agency that had lost its
passion."

Today, the Mint is exploding every stereotype of a government agency -- and is setting a
standard for performance and improvement that would be the envy of most private
companies. Are you trying to improve customer relations? According to the influential
American Customer Satisfaction Index, the Mint now ranks second only to Mercedes-Benz
North America in customer satisfaction. Are you trying to create new lines of business from
your existing people and assets? The Mint is turning its police force -- the folks who, among
other responsibilities, guard Fort Knox -- into a revenue-generating unit that sells its services
to other federal agencies and to foreign governments. It has also launched a new product line
-- the heralded 50 State Quarters Program -- that is attracting a new generation of young
collectors. What's more, the Mint has gone ".com" in a big way -- using the Web to generate
customer feedback on coin designs and taking the "eBay approach" to sell collectibles online.

"We've fundamentally changed people's expectations of our performance," Diehl declares

with obvious satisfaction. "We've changed the expectations of our stakeholders on Capitol
Hill. We've changed the expectations of our employees in terms of how they're treated. And
we've changed our customers' expectations of our performance. In the old days, we shipped

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fewer than 50% of our orders within eight weeks. Today, if it takes two weeks for customers
to receive an order, they complain. When you change expectations, it's very hard for an
organization to relax and slip back into old patterns of behavior."

Diehl, 48, whose nearly six-year tenure is drawing to a close, believes that the Mint's
transformation is comparable to some of the better-known change programs in a private
sector. It's hard to argue with his assessment. "I was sitting in my staff meeting yesterday
afternoon," he says. "I was listening to my director of marketing describe the huge demand
for our products and all the things we're doing on the Web. We've had three straight weeks of
million-dollar sales on the Web, and I fully expect that we'll soon have our first million-dollar
day. I told the folks who were around that table, 'If this were a company, a bunch of you
would be IPO millionaires -- just based on what we've done over the past six months.' And
that's the remarkable thing about what's happened. People have achieved this huge turnaround
without any of the traditional incentives that companies use. Folks here get modest bonuses
and free jackets. They're not doing it for the money."

Change Customer Expectations

Philip Diehl cuts an imposing figure. He's tall, with a full head of jet-black hair, a confident
voice, and a slight Texas twang. He arrived at the Mint with an impressive background:
former chief of staff of the Senate Finance Committee and Lloyd Bentsen's first chief of staff
during Bentsen's tenure as secretary of the treasury. In other words, Diehl could have spent
his early days as director of the Mint making bold declarations, big promises, perhaps even
dire threats. But as a change agent who is in it for the long term, he chose another path.

"I've always been in a hurry," he says. "It's sort of my personal style. But I didn't rush the
changes at the Mint. I started small, with a few initiatives here and there. Then as the
envelope was pushed or as roadblocks appeared, problems were tackled as they cropped up
and progress continued. Big changes have been made over the past six years, but they've been
made incrementally. You do big things by doing lots of small things."

Back in 1994, Diehl and his change-minded Mint colleagues could have taken their first
small steps in just about any direction. Costs needed to be cut. Manufacturing plants needed
to be streamlined. But Diehl's first critical decision was to focus on changes that got to the
heart of the Mint's relationship with its customers. "One of the greatest lessons I've learned,"
he says, "is that if you identify a problem that customers really care about, and then commit
yourself publicly to fixing it -- taking that risk is absolutely crucial to changing an
organization. And if you fix the problem, you build an incredible sense of confidence that the
organization can tackle the next problem."

The customer-service problems that needed to be fixed were plentiful, especially on the
collectibles side. Sure, the Mint manufactures dimes and quarters and guards the gold in Fort
Knox. But it also runs a huge mail-order business -- a government version of L.L. Bean or
Lands' End -- with distributors in 45 foreign countries, that sells coins to more than 1.1
million collectors. Last year, that business alone generated revenue of more than $1 billion.

But the collectibles and commemoratives operation was big despite the Mint, not because of
it. Its customer-service center in Lanham, Maryland was something out of Charles Dickens
rather than Tom Peters. The center sat on the second floor of a converted warehouse.
Customer-service reps were packed into a dismal space where the heat didn't work in the

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winter and the air-conditioning failed in the summer. "It was god-awful," says Diehl. To
make matters worse, the center was housed in the same building as a U.S. Postal Service
regional package-handling facility. Anytime postal workers stumbled on a strange-looking
package, they'd issue a bomb scare, and the entire building would be evacuated. As a result, it
wasn't all that unusual for an incoming call to be answered not by a U.S. Mint customer-
service rep (no matter how frostbitten or heat exhausted) but by an answering machine.

This dysfunctional environment produced depressing results. The Mint was fulfilling only
half of its mail orders within eight weeks. The rest, jokes Kevin Cullinane, 48, assistant
director for customer care, would take anywhere from eight weeks to infinity. "That type of
performance would bankrupt a private company," says Cullinane. But as a government
agency, the Mint simply ignored the reality of its performance. "There was no sense of
urgency about the problem," says Diehl, "or even a sense that there was a problem."

The situation got worse still. One reason that the Mint didn't feel a sense of urgency about its
frayed relationships with customers was that it was basically forbidden from interacting with
them. Prior to the Clinton Administration, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
actively discouraged agencies from spending money on focus groups and surveys -- the most
rudimentary tools used by private companies to gauge their performance. "OMB never saw
the benefit of having an agency talk to its customers," Diehl says half-seriously. "In fact, it
suspected that if you were talking with them, you were conspiring with them -- to get
Congress to do something that OMB didn't want done."

That paranoid mind-set created a bureaucratic maze in which every customer-survey

instrument that the Mint wanted to use had to be approved by OMB -- a review process that
took, on average, six months. So Diehl hit on a simple idea: If the Mint couldn't survey its
customers officially, Diehl himself would do so unofficially. A few weeks after joining the
Mint, he embarked on his own personal fact-finding mission. He went to coin conventions,
talked with the hobby press, found situations in which he could interact with collectors. He
shunned the ceremonial role that the director of the Mint usually played at these functions
(collectors would line up to ask for Diehl's autograph), and did what any smart politician (and
change agent) would do: He worked the room.

Diehl asked questions, listened, and learned. He quickly identified the two most widely
shared complaints about how the Mint did business. One, it took too long to get coins into its
customers' hands. Two, because the Mint required payment up front, it was holding onto its
customers' money for an unreasonably long time.

So Diehl and his colleagues got to work. A task force was formed to work on the two issues.
Three months later, the group had made some progress. But Diehl knew that it would take
more heat to get the fires going: "We had to put our reputation on the line." He went public
with his customer-service agenda. To a very active hobby press, the general media, and a
nervous Mint staff, Diehl promised that from then on, the Mint would process 95% of its
orders within six weeks. That was far from Diehl's ultimate goal -- but it was a big
improvement over existing performance.

His gambit worked. The sense of urgency increased, and a sense of accountability to external
customers kept the pressure up. "Our task force figured out how to meet the six-week goal,"
Diehl says. "Then it set a standard for processing 95% of all orders within four weeks. Over

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the past five years, we've tightened the standard several more times. Today, we are delivering
95% of our products within two weeks, and we're delivering some products within one."

Those tangible achievements touched off a wave of customer-service improvements at the

Mint. Incoming calls to the new customer-service center, located only four miles (but a world
away) from the old facility in Lanham, get answered, on average, in 17.5 seconds rather than
in 2 minutes. Letters about problems or complaints get handled within 3 days, rather than the
42 days it took 3 years ago. Returns or credits get issued in 3 days versus 31.

"Five years ago," says Cullinane, "most people at the Mint, and especially the people in
customer service, believed that their job was to protect the assets of the U.S. government.
Before we send you your coins, we're going to make sure that your check clears, that your
credit is good. We really believed that customers were trying to defraud the government or
take advantage of us. Today, we have gone to the other extreme: The customer is right. The
customer is king. We want our service to rank with the best in business."

It does. A few years into Diehl's tenure, the Mint (along with several other agencies) got
permission to be part of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, an annual poll conducted
by the National Quality Research Center at the University of Michigan Business School. Talk
about a turnaround. The Mint received the best scores of any agency included in the study.
But based on its scores, the Mint would have ranked second in service among the 200
private-sector companies in the poll -- just behind Mercedes-Benz North America and tied
with H.J. Heinz.

Kevin Cullinane feels the changes personally. "The interest in our products is just
phenomenal," he says. "A few years ago, if I went to a party and said I worked at the Mint,
someone might say, 'How about those dollar bills?' when, of course, we make coins. Today,
when I tell someone I'm from the Mint, you can see the excitement: 'What's happening with
the new quarters? I loved the one for New Jersey!' "

Change How You Think about Change

The first wave of change at the Mint was impressive -- but inadequate. It was certainly better
to answer a customer call in 17 seconds than in 2 minutes. And it was better to deliver orders
in two weeks than in eight weeks. But the challenges at the Mint ran deeper than what such
technocratic fixes could solve. There were fundamental problems with strategy, marketing,
even how the agency defined the business it was in. Put simply, the Mint had an identity
crisis. Was it, essentially, a passive manufacturing organization that responded to the
demands of Congress and the Federal Reserve? Or was it a market-driven organization that
could launch product innovations, introduce new promotional campaigns, and change the
game in a business that it has been in for 200 years? "The Mint needed a new story to move it
into the future," says Diehl. "So the story of the Mint was retold, starting with its founding by
Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The story reminded people that the Mint was on
the leading edge of the industrial revolution and was one of the first manufacturing
companies in the United States. Telling that story helped to create a new spirit among the
staff. It got us further out of our bunker mentality."

As the leadership of the Mint thought more deeply about the agency's identity and future, one
of its first insights was that its product offerings were flawed -- especially when it came to
collectibles and commemoratives. For one thing, it was selling too many of them. Five or six

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times a year, Congress would come up with an idea for a commemorative coin to raise money
for a pet cause. But these programs, based more on political calculations than on market
demand, were highly unpopular with collectors. It got so bad that in 1995, the coin-collecting
community actually threatened to boycott the Atlanta Centennial Olympic commemorative --
which would be competing with five other commemoratives in circulation.

"Scarcity drives collectibles," says Diehl. "But we were becoming the coin-of-the-month
club." So he and his crew marched to Capitol Hill to convince Congress to limit its
commemorative coin fix to two per year. "We had finally committed to representing the
interests of our collectors," says Diehl. "And we demonstrated that we were prepared to
defend those interests."

Reducing an oversupply of bad coins simply inspired the next challenge: creating a more
robust market for good coins. The fact was, congressional meddling aside, most of the Mint's
coins weren't very compelling. The themes weren't interesting. The designs, which almost
never changed, weren't engaging. But that hadn't always been the case. Back in the 19th
century, coin designs were ambitious, and they did change frequently -- which is why
collecting had become so popular. But in the 20th century, once the Mint began putting dead
presidents on coins, it became virtually impossible to take them off. Asks Diehl: "Who's
going to propose removing George Washington from the quarter?" Still, Diehl and his crew
understood that unless they changed how the Mint made its change, their ability to make
lasting change at the Mint would be limited.

Enter marketing director David Pickens. Pickens, 53, loves coins. He's been a coin collector,
off and on, since he was eight years old. It was this early love of coins that gave Pickens a
sense of what the Mint's future might hold. "I realized that the Mint could use its heritage and
legacy to make change," says Pickens, whose official title is associate director for
numismatics. "There aren't many organizations that can manufacture to the Mint's quality
levels. Have you heard the term 'mint condition'? Well, this is the Mint! Yet it has suffered
from a lack of strategic imagination and from the stealth marketing that was done.

"The Mint produces a legacy product that people will be collecting through the next several
millennia," Pickens continues. "There's a mystique to this type of permanence. A coin has the
year on it. It has 'In God We Trust' on it. It's sculpture, art, history. It is a representation of
our culture and civilization. Most of our customers buy our coins and never intend to sell
them. They pass them on to their children or their children's children."

The more that Diehl and Pickens thought about the Mint's long-term strategy, the more they
rethought the nature of the business itself. They realized that the Mint wasn't just in the
business of selling collectibles. It was also in the business of creating and fostering exchanges
-- exchanges between fathers and sons, between brothers and sisters, between perfect
strangers. "Coin collectors have always known that coins have two functions in society,"
explains Diehl. "Primarily, coins facilitate commerce. But more important, coinage has
always been used to tell the story of our nation to its own people, and to itself. Only by
understanding how our customers viewed coinage could we rediscover a crucial method of
using coins to tell our own story."

Adds Pickens, "We had forgotten the magic in our product. People were bored with coins.
We had failed to see what it was that made coining and coin collecting exciting."

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Thus began one of the most successful consumer-product launches of the 1990s. The Mint's
50 State Quarters Program, unveiled in December 1998, is a long-term initiative designed to
rejuvenate public interest in coins. The program honors each state with its own special
quarter. It involves the public (through the governor's office of each state) in the design
process. Every 10 weeks for 10 years, a new state quarter gets put into circulation, released in
the order in which each state joined the Union -- first Delaware, then Pennsylvania, New
Jersey, Georgia, and so on.

Like most of the changes at the Mint, the initial push for the State Quarters Program came
from collectors. For years, they'd urged the Mint to reintroduce circulating commemorative
pocket change. But Diehl had been skeptical. His early years at the Mint were tough ones.
Even as he was making big changes in Washington, the Mint's manufacturing operations
were struggling to make enough coins. Diehl had neither the funding flexibility nor the
personal desire to stimulate additional demand. Over time, though, as he sensed the
enthusiasm coming from collectors, he realized that the idea was too good a business
opportunity to pass up.

Of course, even a well-designed product needs a well-defined marketing strategy -- a

competency that the Mint had never developed. How would it tell the public -- and especially
kids, most of whom were more interested in Pokémon cards than in coins -- about this
revolutionary new product? Answer: Kermit the Frog. "We were looking for the right person
to introduce the program, and he volunteered," jokes Pickens. In fact, the Jim Henson Co.
contacted the Mint after it got wind of the program, and an unprecedented public-private
marketing alliance was formed. Kermit, the official Mint spokesfrog, took the agency prime
time -- promoting the 50 State Quarters Program in commercial spots during shows like
NYPD Blue and Jeopardy, and on such cable-TV channels as Nickelodeon, Lifetime,
Discovery, and the History Channel.

The results have been stunning. "How many companies have introduced a product that will
sell more than 4 billion units in its first year and will be touched by every person in this
country?" asks Diehl. "When you think of it in those terms, this program is huge. Even if you
only think of it in profit terms, it's huge."

Huge, indeed. It costs the Mint about five cents to make a quarter. It sells the quarter, through
the Federal Reserve Bank, at face value. Translation: The Mint makes an 80% margin on the
sale of every quarter. The baseline demand for quarters averages 1.5 billion a year. By the
end of 1999, the Mint expects to have produced a total of 3.5 billion quarters, 2 billion above
baseline demand. That's real money. But profit isn't the primary objective. "It would be
disappointing if, at the end of this 10-year program, all we have to show are 10 enormously
profitable years," says Diehl. "Our underlying goal is to rejuvenate coin collecting by getting
the interest of a new generation of coin collectors."

But the long-term effects will involve more than money. The 50 State Quarters Program has
refocused the Mint on the overall collectibles market. And the explosion of Web-based
auction sites -- eBay, Auction.com, Amazon.com, and others -- is helping a fast-growing
activity to grow even faster. In fact, 24% of all coins purchased by collectors are bought
online. Diehl and Pickens quickly realized that to maintain the agency's momentum, the Mint
would have to ".com" itself. "There aren't many companies founded by Thomas Jefferson that
are selling products on the Internet," notes Pickens. This now 207-year-old government
agency would have to embrace e-commerce.

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Weave a Web of Change

Michele Bartram does not collect coins. But she does wear them. A large gold coin bordered
by black onyx hangs around her neck. Two small gold coins, framed by her auburn, shoulder-
length hair, dangle from her ears. Bartram does, however, collect piggy banks. Talking a mile
a minute, she pulls her collection of antique and brand-new banks from a bag and lines them
up on her already-cluttered desk. One of the banks even talks, announcing how much change
sits in its belly.

Bartram, 35, had been acting assistant director of e-business at the U.S. Mint's Office of
Electronic Information and Products. Translation: She's part of the .com crowd -- one of the
fire-in-the-belly, let's-move-on-Internet-time change agents behind the Mint's recent embrace
of the online world. "I don't want to treat symptoms, I want to solve problems," Bartram
declares. "And the Web forces you to address problems that have been swept under the rug
for years. That's why it can feel so threatening. My job is to eliminate fear."

Bartram signed on with the Mint in 1995, after spending five years at IBM, and several more
as a marketing consultant based in Spain. From the moment she walked through the agency's
doors, she found herself in the thick of Diehl's change program. She created and led a task
force that introduced database marketing, an initiative that led to the reorganization of the
Mint into three separate business units. The closer she got to the Mint's customers, the more
eager she became to ask them some basic questions: Why do you collect coins? Do you
collect other things too? How did you become a collector? Do you consider yourself a serious
or a casual collector?

Bartram knew that the Web was the best way to get those answers -- and a perfect way to
work around bureaucratic obstacles such as OMB. "If I can serve more of the public better
and faster electronically, then that's my duty," says Bartram. "The Mint's situation
represented one of the best business cases I'd ever seen for using Web-based technology."
And it wasn't that hard for Bartram to make the case. As a government agency, the Mint has a
legally mandated mission not just to serve but also to educate the public -- whether the public
is defined as coin collectors, contractors, vending-machine makers, or a mother helping her
child with a school project on dimes. "If you give people the information that they want,"
Bartram notes, "you also have the opportunity to say, 'Hey, if you like dimes, you might be
interested in our collectibles.' "

Last December, she got the perfect opportunity to show how the Web's reach could create a
powerful blend of education and commerce. The Mint had been in the middle of a tricky
product-development program. Congress had passed a law mandating the creation of a new
dollar coin to replace the fatally flawed Susan B. Anthony -- which was to coins what the
Edsel was to cars. (Beginning in 1979, the Mint produced 857 million Susan B. Anthony
dollars. Twenty years later, it has yet to exhaust its supply.) The Mint faced some huge -- and
hugely delicate -- questions. What woman from history would replace Susan B. Anthony?
How could the Mint embrace its new enthusiasm for ambitious coin design without raising
protests from an ever-cautious Congress? What marketing strategies would help the new coin
fly off the shelves, rather than gather dust alongside the Susan B.?

The answer to all three questions: Engage the public itself in the design process. Congress left
the choice of who'd be on the coin to Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, who formed the
Dollar Coin Design Advisory Committee to figure it out. Diehl acted as the chair (but as a

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nonvoting member) of the committee, whose members included a member of Congress, an
architect, a sculptor, a numismatist, a university president, an historian, a businesswoman,
and an artist. In June 1998, the committee held two days of televised public hearings and
accepted suggestions on who should be on the coin. Out of 19 semifinalists -- women like
Betsy Ross, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harriet Tubman -- the panel selected Sacagawea, the 15-
year-old Shoshone leader, navigator, diplomat, and translator who played an integral role in
Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition from the Ohio River Valley to the Pacific Ocean.

In August, the committee invited 23 artists to submit designs of Sacagawea for the obverse
side of the coin. After listening to the feedback of representatives from the Native American
community, numismatists, artists, educators, historians, and members of Congress, the
committee narrowed 121 designs down to 13. Then it was time to return to the Web. On
December 7, 1998 (a day that will live in infamy inside the Mint), Diehl had Bartram and her
colleagues post the 13 designs on the agency's Web site. The site generated an astounding
11.7 million hits in one day -- followed by 130,000 email messages over the next two weeks
and thousands of letters. "We had more hits on that one day than we'd had the whole year,"
says Bartram. "Putting those designs on the Web spawned an impassioned grassroots effort.
We received comments not only from individuals but also from entire Native American
tribes, from local communities, even from the American School in Japan, which didn't want
to be left out of the process. It was incredible."

The Sacagawea phenomenon was all anyone needed to sense the power of the Web to shape
the Mint's future. Today, the agency is bursting with online initiatives that would sound
familiar in Silicon Valley: digital desktop branding, personalization engines, "My Mint"
functions, online email targeting. But the initiative about which Bartram is most excited -- the
HIP Pocket Change site -- is the one that best reflects the Mint's distinct history and unique
products.

HIP, which stands for "history in your pocket," comprises several services. It's an educational
tool for teachers. It's also a "digital sandbox" where kids can learn about American history,
math, and language arts while they play with coins. Finally, it's a first step to bringing the
Mint closer to the much-invoked (and seldom realized) goal of an online community. "A real
community is created when you invite people in, provide a framework, give them resources,
step back, and then allow them to create a site that they want and need," says Diehl, who
believes the evolution of HIP is one of the best reflections of the Mint's future business
processes -- and the culmination of the changes that have taken place during his tenure.

For this project, Bartram wrote business plans, won grants, and forged partnerships with a
host of organizations, including the Boy and Girl Scouts of America, the Department of
Education, and the Numismatic Guaranty Corp., which led the community program. The
Learning Space, Washington State's teachers' network, sent a group of teachers to collaborate
with the Mint. Bartram knew that these teachers -- who would cocreate the site and develop
lesson plans for other teachers -- would need a crash course in coins. So she had them meet
with coin specialists from the Smithsonian, talk to numismatists, and go on a field trip to the
Philadelphia Mint, where they received a behind-the-scenes tour of coin production. "While
looking at one machine, a guide was explaining that it cranks out 700 pennies a minute. One
teacher looks at me and says, 'Seven hundred a minute, how many is that in one hour? How
many in one day? In a week?' Instant math lesson!"

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Bartram recently moved on from the Mint, to throw herself headlong into the Web by
building an Internet company for a traditional retailer. But the enthusiasm that she and her
team demonstrated is the best indicator of where Philip Diehl thinks the agency is going.

"My vision for the future doesn't have much to do with the Mint's products, markets,
performance measures, or efficiency," he says. "It has to do with the relationship that people
here have with their work. My goal is to be part of an organization whose members are
engaged as whole people. I want them to have a sense of purpose, excitement, and
fulfillment. The ultimate performance metric might be to call people on Sunday night and ask
them how they feel about going to work the next day. Are they really looking forward to
Monday morning? If the answer is yes, then people can do just about anything."

Anna Muoio (amuoio@fastcompany.com [1]) is a Fast Company associate editor. Learn

more about the U.S. Mint on the Web (www.usmint.gov [2]), or contact Philip Diehl by email
(pdiehl@usmint.treas.gov [3]).

Sidebar: The West Point of Turnarounds

Brad Cooper's initial impressions of his first day on the job were intimidating: a chain-link
fence, enormous coils of barbed wire, a guard at the front gate with a machine gun. Walking
inside, he was a little less intimidated. "The building was so old," he says. "It was like
walking through The Land That Time Forgot. I thought to myself, 'I can't believe I've taken
this job.'"

Cooper was the first nonpolitical appointee to become superintendent of a local Mint. He was
also an experiment in Philip Diehl's change program. Once Diehl changed the law so that he
could appoint whomever he wanted to leadership positions, the question was, Could those
people deliver? Cooper, now 38, was a test case: "West Point was considered the black sheep
of the Mint. Everyone wondered whether it was going to shut down." But Cooper didn't shut
it down -- he turned it around. He became superintendent in 1996, a year in which West Point
made fewer than 638,000 American eagle gold coins -- and had reject rates that were higher
than 8%. Last year, it made nearly 2.8 million gold coins (along with more than 166,000
platinum coins) -- and had reject rates as low as 0.5%.

How did Cooper change so much so fast? By applying to the West Point Mint his personal
approach to minting change.

Don't just do something, sit there.

Cooper knew he had to unleash changes or the facility's future was in jeopardy. He also
sensed a climate of fear among the 220 employees. So for three months, he just listened: "I
basically walked around. I met with everyone in small groups. I did nothing -- because I
knew that if I started acting before I had built trust, any changes would fail."

Sell hope, not fear.

After his listening tour, Cooper had doubts about the operation's viability. But he painted a
vivid picture of an upbeat future: "I told people that we could radically improve our
productivity, quality, and financial position." He also painted a tough picture of what might

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happen without change: "Only huge gains could prevent reasonable minds from shutting us
down."

The shortest road to change isn't a straight line.

Despite his patience, Cooper had a brutal first six months as West Point. But as his changes
became performance gains, and as the takeoff in the market for gold bullion triggered big
increases in West Point's production, small strides snowballed into major advances. "The
more we improved, the more people wanted to keep improving," Cooper says. "People here
were once considered the worst manufacturing organization in the Mint. Now they see that
they can be the best."

Contact Brad Cooper by email (bcooper@usmint.treas.gov [4]).

Links:
[1] mailto:amuoio@fastcompany.com
[2] http://www.usmint.gov
[3] mailto:pdiehl@usmint.treas.gov
[4] mailto:bcooper@usmint.treas.gov

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