Grassroots Leadership - Ford Motor Co.

And it was not immediately popular. Students who had come to Wharton for its strong finance and general-management faculty found themselves learning about personal development and work-life balance. And some faculty members balked at Friedman's promotion of interdepartmental course offerings. "Wharton prepared Stew well for any resistance that he's now facing at Ford," says Jessica DeGroot, 38, a Wharton graduate who has worked with Friedman on work-life research.

In 1997, Ford was starting down a similar path. Tichy designed a program called Capstone to develop those executives who had the potential to move up to the top. The idea was that each year Ford would tap 36 of its brightest stars to visit Dearborn for a week of classes. Those executives, grouped in teams of six -- each including members from diverse areas of the company -- would be assigned a strategic group project by Nasser himself. Six months later, the teams would report back to the CEO on their findings.

Tichy also masterminded the Business Leadership Initiative (BLI), which sprang from a series of meetings that were led by Nasser in 1997. Nasser had realized that few of his top auto executives fully grasped the fundamentals of Ford's business. Many of them didn't even know what Ford's price-earnings ratio was -- or what "P/E" meant in the first place. Nasser explained: Here's why we have to transform Ford. Look at our P/E ratio. Chrysler's is higher; GE's is much higher. Look at our asset utilization -- also low. If we want to survive, then we must find a way to change that.

And then, he commanded his lieutenants: Explain this to your people -- all of them. And so, guided by Tichy, executives led the first "cascade" to 300 direct reports. That second tier taught 2,000 more employees. Within 9 months, 55,000 U.S. employees had learned about Ford's P/E ratio and why it mattered. The next year, the cascade exploded -- reaching all 100,000 salaried workers worldwide.

Friedman's mandate was to do leadership development on an epic scale, to extend the principles of Capstone and the BLI deep into the organization. "I had an opportunity to combine everything that I had ever done into something with a much broader scope and impact," says Friedman. "This was about creating dramatic change. It was about training legions of crusaders in the service of transformation. It was a daunting task, but it was an exciting one."

Ford's Leadership Curriculum

On the fourth floor of Ford's monolithic quality, manufacturing, and purchasing center, an army of engineers pack a dense cubicle labyrinth. Roughly 100 of them spend a large part of their day focusing on packaging. As an in-plant assembly specialist for the department, Karl Heid, 34, develops material-handling processes, as well as guidelines for implementing new model and corporate programs. The job bears all the trappings of an airtight functional silo, and Heid struggles against the siren of institutional myopia. A newly promoted supervisor in May 1999, he was among the first chosen for Ford's New Business Leader program. Now he has returned to the silo, eager to bust out.

"It was a great week," says Heid. "It renewed for me the idea that I'm not supposed to look around for leadership. I'm working on a project that could change the nature of Ford's relationship with its customers. People often ask me how this project applies to my job. Well, it doesn't. But in order to drive change, I have to step out of my functional competency. This idea will get implemented -- if not by my team then by someone else. Either way, Ford wins."

Such is the energy of grassroots leadership. Within months of leaving Wharton, Stew Friedman's long-term strategy emerged: He would retain Capstone as the vehicle for top-tier leadership training. To that, he would add the Experienced Leader Challenge, a similar program aimed at newly promoted managers who are one or two levels away from the top -- 180 of them a year. A program called Ford Business Associates would target managers right below them. Perhaps most important, Friedman would hold 60 New Business Leader sessions a year, accommodating some 2,000 first-level supervisors. The result: nimble leaders at all levels.

The programs vary in their sophistication and intensity, but the urgency behind them is consistent. "You are in the vanguard of a revolution," Friedman exhorts his New Business Leader recruits. "You are the first wave of change, of how we will grow the future leadership of this company."

And the programs share a few core canons. For one thing, they're all committed to "action learning." A month before their weeklong workshop, New Business Leader trainees get an assignment. They must each identify and develop a "Quantum Idea Project" (QIP) that will transform Ford into a more consumer-driven, shareholder value-driven company. They must then present that idea to their peers and instructors on the first day of the workshop. After that, they have three months to get the project rolling.