As I said in my last post on on the Stanford Student Who Tried to Work at Ford, I've been astounded by both the amount and quality of reactions to my post last Thursday on The Auto Industry Bailout. I argued that I am ambivalent about whether or not the bailout should happen, but if it does happen, part of the deal has to be a path to fundamental cultural and organizational change. I argued that in particular GM seems to be designed to keep its executives as clueless as possible and that the company is poisoned with a "can't do" attitude — that their core competence is explaining why change isn't possible and (based on watching the hearings again)why NONE of the problems they face are management's fault.
At the moment, Thursday's post has generated about 10,000 page views (about 20 times my average post) and 42 comments, plus I have received another 20 or so emails from people who prefer not to make public comments. These comments are all thoughtful and some are so good that I think it is worthwhile reprinting them again as posts. The first "reprint" was from that eager young engineer mentioned above who was dismayed by his experience at Ford. Here is the second, which I find astounding. My original post argued that one reason that leaders at GM were so clueless is that power dynamics in meetings (and other interactions) are deeply dysfunctional, with the highest status person in the group doing all the talking and none of the listening, regardless who has the most expertise in the room. As a result, it seems to be a system designed to preserve the status of those at the top rather than to get the best information to the right people at the right time.
This conclusion resulted from observations (often measuring talking time) during meetings I have attended at GM over the past 30 years for diverse reasons. Matthew E. May, who spent 8 years working full-time for Toyota University and is the author of The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation, describes a trick he used in a meeting at GM to bring these dynamics to light and to show the damage that they can do. I guess they didn't learn lesson. Here is Matthew's amazing story:
Thank you for a thoughtful and
insightful post. Everything you describe mirrors my experience with a
part of GM in the early 90s. I was doing some consulting with a division of
GM and told them the best ideas were not getting heard – in fact, no ideas were being heard. The managers to a person told me that wasn't their
culture. During an offside I had the opportunity to design part of the
program. It was an age-old prioritization game called Survival on the
Moon: you've crash landed on the moon, 200 clicks from the mother ship,
with 25 items you have to rank in the order of their importance in
surviving the trek to the ship. You do it individually, then as a
group, in order to make the point that "we" is smarter "me". (There is
a right order, provided by NASA.) I constructed the table rounds
cross-hierarchically, so one table might have a vp and a lowly staffer.
Then I played a dirty trick: I gave the lowest ranking person at each
table the answers ahead of time, saying that when it came time for the
group ranking, their job was to everything in their power to convince
the table they had the right ranking, short of revealing that I had
given them the answer. Not a single table (about 15 tables of 10) got
the right answer. Then I had the ringers stand up. Got to catch all the
managers red-faced.
I spent 8 years inside Toyota as a fully retained adviser to the
University of Toyota. It is the antithesis of everything you describe.
Matthew,thanks so much for sharing this story. It holds lessons not just about where GM needs to change, but should serve as a cautionary tale for every boss. Matthew's trick would work in a lot of other organizations. For example,it would work in hospitals where nurses are often afraid to speak-up when doctors make a mistake and ignored and belittled when they do (although some are getting better). And if you want to read about an organization that — at least for many years — suffered from the same dynamics, go to the official report written by the blue-ribbon committee that investigated the accident that destroyed the Columbia Space Shuttle. It it is one of the best management books ever written and you can get it free online.
In fact, this all raises an interesting question: If you are the boss, how do you stop these dysfunctional dynamics from happening? I recently wrote that getting out of the way for awhile (as John F. Kennedy did) is one solution. Any other ideas?
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