Visitors at Echo Global Logistics Inc. ask Douglas R. Waggoner about the buzzing energy that makes the Chicago headquarters feel like a Wall Street trading floor.
“I jokingly say, … ‘If you take 1,000 24-year-olds and put them in a small enough room, the culture creates itself,’” says Waggoner, the CEO. “It’s a joke, but there’s also truth to that.”
The truth is Generation Y is strongly represented at Echo, (NASDAQ: ECHO), a provider of technology-enabled transportation and supply chain management services.
Waggoner, who previously founded SelecTrans LLC and served as CEO of USF Bestway, always felt like the young guy in the business. But when he stepped into Echo in December 2006, he realized the millennials there had their own way of doing things.
“I came from the world of command and control, hierarchy, corporate structure and work charts — how many stripes are on your sleeve,” he says. “That doesn’t work here. At Echo, our culture is largely defined by the millennial generation.
“People don’t really care what your title is or how long you’ve been around. It’s more like, ‘I’ve got a job to do; how are you going to help me do it?’ and, ‘These are the problems we’re facing; how are you going to help me deal with them?’”
Basically, he learned that his more than 1,000 employees are full of ideas for getting results. He just needs to create an open environment for those and then stay out of the way.
Those fresh perspectives have grown Echo’s revenue from $95.5 million in 2007 to $259.6 million in 2009. But that’s not all.
“I’ve grown as a result of being around a lot of people that thought differently about things than I did,” Waggoner says. “I came into the company with the idea that I was going to teach them a thing or two about the industry. More than that happening, I’ve learned a lot about what I didn’t know. You’ve got to be open-minded about the potential for better ways of doing things that might be foreign to your experience pattern.”
