Executives Head for the Hills : Cipher Data Takes Acid Test in Teamwork

Last Wednesday was not just another day at the office for Cipher Data Products President and Chief Executive Gary Liebl.

By 10 a.m., his tennis shoes were soaked and his Jordache jeans were spattered with mud.

A handful of his top managers were falling backward out of trees, and others were wearing blindfolds, as they stumbled through the wet bottomland of Penasquitos Canyon Reserve in Northern San Diego County.

But things really didn’t get sticky until mid-afternoon, when a blindfolded Liebl found himself stranded on a wobbly wooden beam that stretched across an imaginary “acid-filled” river. While a group of managers shouted encouragement and advice, a pair of managers carefully balanced themselves on either side of the executive and guided him to safety.

“They always told me Cipher Data was an exciting place to work,” deadpanned one of the 99 Cipher Data managers and executives who spent last Wednesday working through the problems, pratfalls and adventures of a one-day, abbreviated management and group participation skills program conducted by the Colorado Outward Bound School’s San Diego-based subsidiary.

Cipher Data took to the unspoiled hills and valleys of Penasquitos Canyon Reserve with the hope that its managers would learn group communication skills that would help the company cope during an ongoing computer industry downturn.

The expedition by Cipher Data, which designs and manufactures magnetic tape peripherals and controllers used in data storage systems, is evidence of the unusual steps that companies are taking to build a team spirit that will help them endure in volatile times.

The Outward Bound program, for example, has attracted increasing interest from corporations. In 1986, corporate clients are likely to generate more than $500,000 in revenue for the nonprofit Colorado school, one of five Outward Bound programs in the United States. As recently as 1979, Outward Bound’s courses for corporations brought in only about $20,000.

“To be blunt, this is an experiment,” Liebl said, while his Outward Bound team, which had dubbed itself the “Pink Panthers,” sat in a sun-drenched field munching bagels stuffed with Cheddar cheese and celery sticks coated with peanut butter--all washed down with a container of orange drink.

Liebl predicted that the Outward Bound expedition would leave his sunburned and mud-covered managers better equipped to manage the “constantly changing environment in the computer industry.”

Like the rest of that industry, Cipher Data has had its share of troubles. Although Cipher Data finished fiscal 1985 in the black, profits fell by 83% to $655,000 in the first quarter ended Sept. 30 and revenue fell 15% to $36.2 million. The results reflected a “very sudden and intense” drop in demand that started during the second half of the fiscal year, which ended June 30. Cipher has responded by trimming staff, reducing inventories and announcing a joint venture with IBM.

President Resigned

The company also saw the departure last April of President and Chief Operating Officer Charles Mathews, who resigned after 15 months because of what one Cipher Data officer called a “mismatch of management styles.” Liebl joined Cipher Data last October after serving as group operating officer in McDonnell Douglas’ Information Systems Group.

To emphasize the changing environment in the computer industry, only a handful of top executives had been informed that one day of Cipher Data’s four-day sales, marketing and management meeting would be spent in the Penasquitos Canyon Reserve.

One manager, who suggested that surprises were the only constant during the four-day meeting, laughed as he described how one of the earlier meetings was interrupted when the Pacifica High School Marching Band burst in playing the theme from “Rocky.”

Wednesday’s canyon break was equally unexpected, even though managers knew they would be part of an Outward Bound program.

“I had a picturesque view of sitting somewhere watching whales go by,” said one executive. “All they told us was to wear blue jeans and tennis shoes.”

Outward Bound’s nine instructors led the managers through a course that forced participants to rely upon each other’s strengths--both physical and mental--and to acknowledge their own weaknesses.

More-Complex Problems

Early exercises--falling backward into the outstretched arms of their fellow patrol members or trying to untie a human knot of eight executives holding hands--warmed the managers to more-complex problems slated for later in the day.

The managers paid special attention to nature’s details during an exercise in which team members were blindfolded and led over logs and through the Penasquitos Creek.

“To think that I’m paying you guys to take a walk through the woods,” Liebl laughed as the Pink Panthers--wet, muddy and whistling the theme from “Bridge Over the River Kwai”--broke from lunch and followed their Outward Bound instructor to one of the tougher problems--the innocently titled “retrieval exercise.”

The exercise began unexpectedly when one team member was required to play blind and was blindfolded. The only cure for the “blind” team member was perched precariously in the middle of an imaginary acid-filled pool. To complicate matters, the guide sentenced the blindfolded manager to imaginary death unless he could retrieve the cure in 20 minutes.

The Pink Panthers hammered out a makeshift plan. One woman designated herself as timekeeper and another team member climbed a nearby tree to fasten a rope to a limb that stretched out over the pit.

Grabbed the Antidote

The team tied the blindfolded manager to the rope, dangled him over the pit and shouted directions and encouragement. He safely grabbed the antidote.

Things didn’t go as well for one other patrol, which found itself handicapped after its instructor struck half of the team ‘blind’ and left the sighted members ‘mute.’

Mike Lakowicz, a Boston-based sales manager who had spent 20 tough minutes hanging from the rope, used his last bit of strength to toss the antidote to safety--and subsequently fell, exhausted, into the imaginary pool of acid. “We’ve got good news and bad news,” quipped a team member.

The physical and emotional wear quickly pushed Cipher Data’s managers to humor, gallows and otherwise.

“Let’s just throw the blind guys in the river and get the hell out of here,” joked one manager, frustrated because his team couldn’t figure out the simple geometric design that would allow them to use three wooden beams to cross the imaginary acid river.

And, just seconds before an Outward Bound instructor fell backward from a tree limb into the awaiting arms of his patrol, he asked if the patrol was trustworthy. “Just like Lucy and Charlie Brown,” chuckled a team member. “Go for it.”

Humor aside, Cipher Data executives say the Outward Bound program helped them understand how real and imagined handicaps could be overcome with teamwork.

Constructed Language

After a few frustrating minutes, the patrol that had been struck blind and mute quickly constructed a basic language that used hand claps to signal “yes,” “no” and “maybe.”

“It was instant frustration to be blind,” acknowledged one patrol member. “I felt that, if we could at least see the problem, we could find a solution.”

“I felt that I had become the slave of the sighted person,” recalled another manager.

“We exhibited good, spontaneous teamwork, and it seems that we had to work at it less hard than earlier in the day,” Liebl said of the Pink Panther’s successful acid river crossing. “We planned it and leveraged the teamwork that we built earlier in the day.”

Liebl said Monday that exercises such as the “acid river” course “stressed the importance of participative management. For a manager to sit behind four walls and to think he’s smart enough to know the solution to every problem is horribly naive. I’m always stressing that we go to the hands-on people for those solutions.”

The daylong expedition also gave Cipher Data’s weary Outward Bounders a cache of good stories.

Early on, Liebl’s patrol accidently stumbled off of the reserve and into a woman’s yard. “She took one look at us (wearing) the (safety) helmets and started looking for the motorcycles,” Liebl said with a chuckle. “I can just imagine what she was thinking.”