Eileen Fisher is an enterprise with nearly a thousand employees focused on selling clothes for women in department stores, catalogues and fifty-five Eileen Fisher shops throughout the United States.
A passage in an Eileen Fisher brochure entitled "Simply to Be Ourselves":
The underlying philosophy of our design--no constraints, freedom of expression--extends to the company itself, which is run in a loosely structured manner that allows for an open exchange of ideas. Every employee is encouraged to give input to any area, no matter their position or expertise. The individual is valued for the total picture of who they are and what they can contribute.
Hilary Old, vice president for communications, said, "What we're trying to do with this different kind of leadership is to have the leader facilitate the process, so you get the team or the craft team in the room together, to ideate together, to generate the ideas together, and then figure out who's going to hold what, who's going to move what forward, so it's less of, it's more about kind of again the holding the space for the team to find.
The company has nothing to hide. It is remarkably benign and well intended. It has a profit-sharing plan for its employees, whereby twenty-nine percent of the profits are given to them.
Chief Executive Officer, Susan Schor, was teaching courses on "leadership skills" and "interpersonal skills" at the Pace University business school when she and Eileen Fisher met. What did Schor do? All that Schor would say was that "it was not a happy place when I came," and now it is "a pretty happy organization that keeps getting happier and happier."
