Grassroots Leadership - Ford Motor Co.

"This leadership effort is about as scaled up as any that I've ever participated in," says Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School and the author of "The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders at Every Level" (HarperBusiness, 1997) who has acted as a consultant to Ford for the past three years. Indeed, Ford intends to accomplish what Tichy did at General Electric's now-famed Crotonville, New York training center in the 1980s -- only much, much faster. "As far as leadership goes, Jack Welch was ahead of his time," Tichy says. "But he had time. In today's world, he would have to do what he did 10 times faster."

Ford's effort is both massive and many-pronged. It demands that leaders themselves do the teaching, because teaching will make them stronger leaders. It proposes to create "total leaders" who can effectively integrate their work with family and community. It enforces group work, both as a pedagogic vehicle and as a way to promote employees' understanding of Ford as a whole. And it demands feedback and accountability: This test does count, folks.

Ford views grassroots leadership as the best vehicle for creating a nimbler business. "We want people at all levels who will take risks, who are prepared to coach and to counsel, and who can make decisions," says David Murphy, 54, vice president of human resources. "We can't afford to wait for decisions to come down from the top. If we did, the consumer would be pissed off about having to wait so long -- and would be gone before those decisions even got made."

At the same time, Ford needs business results. That's why every element of its leadership-development strategy is rooted in action. Ford wants to grab its people by the throat and shake them up. A project that creates discomfort promises great learning and profound improvement. Ford's new leaders are actually responsible for instigating discomfort, for forcing change up to the higher levels of an unwilling organization, while Nasser forces it down from above.

If its leadership initiative succeeds, Ford will create a company that is built on a foundation of discomfort. It will create an organization that is flush with people who test the boundaries, who revel in accountability, and who make decisions themselves, rather than pushing those decisions up the line. Ford's leaders will think of themselves as crusaders in the service of transformation. In short, they will revolt.

Leaders Are Made -- and Born

Tom Iseghohi is a born leader. Growing up in Nigeria, he helped his mother run a construction-supply company. He was passionate, entrepreneurial, and savvy. After completing his MBA, he joined Ford's finance operation in 1989. And then, two and a half years later, he left.

Eleven years ago, Ford was no place for an entrepreneur. And Iseghohi, now 36, loved pushing the envelope and questioning the status quo. Ford's slow-paced, structured environment frustrated him. So he accepted an offer from Pepsi-Cola, where he thrived on diverse assignments ranging from sales to product engineering. By 1997, he reported directly to Pepsi-Cola's chief financial officer.

Then Ford asked him to come back. He agreed. "I'm still shocked that I left Pepsi," says Iseghohi. "But I was convinced that Ford's top leaders were serious about change. They understood what it took to attract someone like me. Talented people don't want an easy slam dunk; they want a challenge. They're passionate about winning, and they want the people around them to share that passion. To be a successful entrepreneur, you must accept risk. You have to be comfortable standing on the precipice, asking, 'Why not?' "

Ford needed more people like Iseghohi. To find and train them, it needed a leadership guru, someone who would fuel the revolution with waves of fresh troops. The automaker wanted an outsider, someone who was unburdened with corporate history. It wanted someone with real-world credibility and political savvy who could make radical ideas stick in a conservative organization. It wanted a leader with a backbone who wouldn't buckle at the first sign of a challenge.

It found Stew Friedman.

A year ago, Friedman, now 47, was a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He was well known in human-resources circles as a leading thinker on work-life issues; he was coauthor of a forthcoming book, "Work and Family: Allies or Enemies?" (Oxford University Press, 2000); and he was on "Working Mother" magazine's list of the top 25 men who had succeeded in improving the lives of working parents.

But more to the point, in 1991 Friedman had created a leadership program that would become a defining experience for Wharton's first-year MBA students. The program drew on Friedman's training as an organizational psychologist and on the ideas of Tichy and other professors at the University of Michigan, where he'd studied in the 1980s. It combined personal growth with team development.