Jerry Baldwin is the CEO of ZRA Communications, a large services firm primarily engaged in the field of public relations. You may have seen ZRA Communications in the news recently – they have taken the bold step of eliminating all paper from the company. ZRA employees no longer use pen and paper. Baldwin has done away with copy machinesm and he has relegated printers to a newly formed department, the External Information Interface Unit.

What on earth, is Baldwin doing ? Isn’t he placing the likelihood of his company at risk with this senseless move ? How could he possibly justify this radical strategy to his partners ? We met with him to ask.

Baldwin’s office is not unlike that of any other executive. In fact, there is quite a bit of paper lying around. An annual report sits with several other glossy brochures on a coffee table. Books line the shelves of his mahogany book cases. However, no stray papers sit on his desk. There is no intray or outray. No printer attached to his notebook computer. There is not a pen or pencil in sight.

As we sat across from Baldwim, I felt a little self-conscience taking out my notepad and pen.

Q: The first question is easy – why ?

A: The first reason that comes to mind is money. Think of the savings. We don’t have to buy paper. We don’t need places to store the paper. We don’t have to dispose of paper. We don’t need ink, or devices to deliver it. We don’t need pencils, sharpeners, or erasers. We don’t need toner, ink cartridges, the machines that use them, or the inevitable technicians that come to fix them. We don’t need fastening devices to put papers together, or devices to separate them. I don’t need to pay anyone to deliver it. And you know what’s next ? Why do I need this huge desk ?

But that wasn’t what drove our decision. We took this step to improve teaming, because we feel that paper creates hindrances. We brought workspace consultants in the past to improve our collaborating, and they made some valuable contributions. We anticipate the paperless environment will have a much greater impact than all of our consultants’ ideas combined.

Q: Can you really forbid all paper in the company ?

A: No, of course not. As you look around, you see books and brochures. The SEC requires us to publish an annual report, but of course we make it available on-line and we will happily e-mail it to any investor. Our customers still want paper brochures, but again we look for ways to communicate electronically. We haven’t eliminated books – I have always loved books. And I don’t think there is an electronic substitute for the paper you find in the restrooms.

You know, we can’t tell our employees not to read newspapers. /but we help our employees find news on the Internet, and we are encouraging and teaching them to use it. We have made sure that they always have the best technology access to information.

We may have more than consumed all of our savings with investments in technology and training, but we think we are developing critical capabilities. Our employees have no option but to find electronic alternatives for accomplishing what they used to on paper. We are completely reinventing ourselves daily, and those who see it through will come out with a set of skills that would make any competing company green with envy.

Q : Why this crusade against paper ?

I don’t have anything against paper, per say. We are not looking to get rid of paper – we are looking to do our work better. We feel that paper has become an obstacle to making a bold step forward.

The interaction between a sheet of paper and a person is an isolated, private event. Most of what we write on paper gets discarded unless reproduced either in a meeting orally or typed into a computer. By eliminating the paper, an employee must interact either with another employee or with a computer capable of capturing his thoughts and distributing them. In either case, the team captures the interaction.

We aren’t completely paperless – there are times when we feel that paper can do a better job than electronics. As an example, we still use flip charts in our meetings, so we can spread out ideas as they come. We think this is an outstanding way of collaborating and brainstorming. Unless someone comes up with a tool to do it better without paper, we will stick with our easels and magic markers.

Q : What are some of the objections you have had to overcome, and what have you done to address them ?

One of the biggest problems with electronic text is the quality of computer screens. Most of the people we spoke to objected to having to read from a screen.

We handled this in two ways. First, we looked for technology advances in liquid crystal displays. We worked with leading ophthalmologists, and hired optics firms to work with a number of different filters and lighting situations. We don’t think we are quite there yet, but we have made significant progress and we are moving in the right direction.

More importantly, we have reexamined the way we communicate. What we do now is we try to reproduce paper on a computer screen. This is absurd. The computer gives all sorts of new ways to communicate. The first thing we had to get rid of is the typical 12 point text on a page in a portrait layout. We have trained our employees to use the latest in presentation graphics, including adding video and audio clips. Our employees now have a large toolbox of communications methods that won’t require the recipient to go through the squinting normally associated with reading tiny text on a computer screen.

Our employees were also concerned about carrying information around. They were afraid they would either be chained to their desks or have to drag laptop computers around. Again, we applied technology to the problem. We took laptop computers, and with the help of one of our suppliers, essentially removed the keyboards and storage devices. We added flash memory and this nifty little port here on the side. We now keep this in bays of 16, and you grab one when you need one. The bays are each attached to a « server », if you will, and you can choose which information you wish to download to your « portable reading device » The newest batch comes with screens onto which you can write. We wanted to have these from the start, and that we didn’t get them until now really hurt. We will fully deploy them throughout the company within the next couple of weeks.

The new reading devices (we call them PRD’s) will allow us to capture a presentation, and « write » on it by simply writing on the touch screen. The comments then are « attached » to the page. The real beauty of this system comes when we plug the units back into the server – we capture all of the comments electronically. Try to imagine this in a meeting. I head off to a meeting, grab a PRD and choose the presentation materials. As the meeting goes on, I make notes right on the document, some to myself, some for the presenters. When I finish, I replace the PRD, and it uploads the document, notes and all, to the server. The notes are now available here on my desktop, plus the team has access to them.

Of course, change has been a major problem for our employees. We have completely redefined « work ». This change is absolutely radical, but we have complete confidence in its long term benefits. The long-term solutions to many of the problems our people have expressed are not in technological gizmos but in changing the way we do things. We have to be much less concerned with documents and much more concerned with ideas. « Working » can no longer refe4 to generating reams of paper, but must refer to generating profit.

Q : Aren’t you concerned that you are giving your competitors an advantage, even if it’s just for the time being ?

A : I think what you are asking is whether our competitors have an advantage by sticking with paper. When we started exploring the elimination of paper, we considered the advantages that paper has today.

One of the big concerns is portability. Take a look at your notepad. You’ll bring that home tonight, and you can read it on the train. Or on your desk at home. But how heavy is your briefcase ? If I take home one of my PRD’s with 100 pages of text, it weighs 2.3 pounds. If you fill your briefcase with 100 pages, I bet it weighs about a pound and a half. But if I carry 1000 pages, it still weighs 2.3 pounds.

Is paper really that much more portable ? Would you be willing to put a single sentence on a piece of paper ? What would you think of someone who gave you a 500 page document with 10,000 words on it ? I can do that electronically. If that’s the best way to communicate, why not ?

Another concern is reliability. Anyone who has lost data on a computer knows all about that. For now, data duplication is the rule of thumb. Our IT people have written backup routines into almost every save function that’s done on the network. This is an incredibly inefficient way of doing things.

What this comes down to is being rigorous in controlling our failure rate. When you don’t have a backup plan, and you are at a high risk of loss, you become more attentive. For example, the brakes on your car are mechanical, therefore are prone to failure. How many times have your brakes failed on you ? Hopefully, none. You are fairly sure to check things to make sure your brakes don’t fail, because an air bag does not make for a very good backup.

You know what else ? Most of the companies in today’s world are so dependent on their computer systems that paper has become the air bag. I don’t think paper makes a good backup device.

Q : What about the outside world that still uses paper ?

A : We’ve taken a hard line with our suppliers on not sending us paper but communicating with us electronically. Unfortunately, the whole world is not up with us, so we have had to establish an External Information Interface Unit. We have set up an office (near the front door, by the way) with scanners equipped with optical character reading capabilities and printers so that we can communicate with the outside world. All paper either entering or leaving the company ends at this appendage. Our ultimate goal is to get rid of the unit.

Q : What are the critical success factors in your mind to making this work ?

A : I believe there are two components for success – the people who must make the change, and the people who support them. I can’t do this without complete buy-in from our team. Of course, we will lose some people who simply can’t handle the switch. What that leaves us behind is a core of dynamic, radical-thinking people who not only love a challenge but must think creatively all of the time for solutions.

We had to reengineer our IT support. Completely. Totally. We needed a completely new mindset. These guys now know that systems can bring the whole thing to a screaming halt. The network simply can’t go down. We can’t afford even to lose an hour – not just for productivity loss, but for the confidence in the system.

We are not into whiz-bang technology. True, we need high technology to make this change work, but we pay our IT guys on controlling down-time. We have outside contractors on retainer who can deploy as many resources as we need. We consider Microsoft Word running on an administrator’s computer as important as would a bank consider its back office computing.

Q : How did you implement your plan ? Slowly ? What went first ?

A : We didn’t feel that we could ease into this. We started by taking out copy machines and printers. I understand we practically closed Kinkos for the first week, because all of our managers were sneaking out of the office. It was a brutal adjustment, make no mistake.

I have a core belief. I truly believe that when you put people in a position where they face failure, they will succeed. Look at what drives the success of Just-In-Time management. A single fault or defect can close down the WHOLE line, so you simply can’t have defects. And companies who use JIT don’t have defects. They have some of the most ingenious workers who find solutions to problems RIGHT NOW.

I’m looking for that kind of effort and thinking in this company. We have pulled away the safety nets because we felt that as long as there was a feeling that we could always go back to paper, this would NEVER work. Never.

When was the last time you heard of a service company putting its own back up against the wall ?

Q : Any final thoughts ?

A : Take a moment to think about what your life would be like without touching a piece of paper or a pen. No newspaper in the morning. No mail. No trips to the file cabinets. Much less contact with your secretary (who now serves a lot more people). Meetings no longer get in the way of your work, they are your work.

Think about your own world. I imagine that your readers are most likely holding a piece of paper to read this. Think about what occupies your desktop now ? How much of it would you still need if you worked for me ? What activities would you still do ? Which ones wouldn’t you do ? Would I be correct to say that any activity you would eliminate is time you are now wasting ?