'How Do We Break Out of the Box We're Stuck In? '

Donald Winkler, 52
Chairman and CEO
Ford Motor Credit Co.
Dearborn, Michigan

It was early in the morning, and Donald Winkler's office telephone was not accommodating his distinctive view of the universe. That is, the freaking voice mail wasn't working. Winkler punched numbers in an order he thought was right, but the system rejected them each time. Growing more and more agitated, he finally yelled at the recalcitrant device, "Goddamn it to hell!"

At that, the chairman and CEO of Ford Motor Credit Co. caught himself. He jumped from his desk, spun around, and dug into a cabinet drawer. Winkler is rummaging through the same drawer right now, reenacting the moment in an interview. He turns and presents himself -- transfigured! A red latex ball adorns his nose. "That morning, I looked at myself in the mirror with this on, and I asked, What did I accomplish by getting mad at the telephone? I felt like a fool," Winkler says.

Here is what we take away from that episode, in the words that Winkler himself espouses.

Donald Winkler is profoundly dyslexic, and he is a startlingly effective leader. Donald Winkler doesn't fail. Events fail.

You don't see many guys with red latex noses roaming the top floor of Ford Motor's world-headquarters building. Up until now.

Mark Turner, 34, vice president, corporate risk, Ford Credit: "We were meeting with a group of managers from Ford Motor. On the first day, one of the Ford Motor guys piped up, 'If you guys in credit would just do this.' Don said, 'Hang on. I'm an officer of Ford Motor Co. We're all part of Ford. If you're going to sit in this room and work on this team, you've got to drop this 'we' and 'they.' And if you have a problem with that, let's step outside.' Don didn't realize what 'stepping outside' meant in the manufacturing world. It was just his way of engaging. The whole meeting went quiet. He came back after a break and apologized. He said, 'I'm just trying to make the point that this is a collective effort.' People got the message, and this has turned into one of the most high-performing teams that I've worked on at Ford."

Don Winkler, 52, is a dominating man. It is not just his weight, which, through lack of exercise, has ballooned to 250 pounds in the past year. Winkler talks straight, he talks often, and he enjoys monopolizing a room. Colleagues acknowledge, with both amusement and annoyance, that they must battle him in meetings for control of the microphone. For relaxation outside work, he lectures at schools and universities -- wherever there's an audience.

Winkler's publicity handlers warn that he tends to wander during conversations. He does, egregiously, though where he strays typically is at least as compelling as whatever point he may have left behind. They mention his need to focus his gaze on something -- which is why, if you don't offer constant eye contact, he requires a mirror, a picture, or a window reflection behind you to avoid being distracted. Talking on the telephone, he sometimes stares at himself on a TV monitor or in a small mirror by his phone. He scribbles constantly in a little notebook to help track and synthesize what happens around him.

Winkler, in other words, struggles to process the world in the way that the rest of us do. On the other hand, he often sees that world in ways that we can't or won't. That a man of such disjointed perception was hired a year ago to run Ford's huge finance arm (with more than 10 million customers and $165 billion in receivables) speaks to his productive harnessing of something that most people reckon is a disability. It also says something about how business today must be done and how we must think to survive. The complex, the chaotic, the unexpected -- that is reality. Companies and their managers who steer straight-line courses do so at their own peril. Paths must be continually flexible and constantly recharted.

So it is for Ford. The company provides financing for more of its customers, more profitably, than anyone else in the industry. Yet late last year, Ford Credit was losing business in the United States to banks. And while truck sales were strong, sales growth for many of Ford Motor's cars was weak. "When you're best in class," Winkler observes, "you risk standing still. It's easy to be too content. You need to take the paradigm that you're in and turn it upside down."

That is to say, you slap on a red nose in meetings to show you don't take yourself too seriously. You launch "Cato attacks" (after the hyperkinetic character of Pink Panther films) on the people who report to you, calling them out of the blue and demanding that they immediately recite their strategic priorities. You tweak the organizational language. Winkler, for example, won't allow the word "but" to be spoken in his presence. "And," which is more inclusive and more constructive, is the accepted conjunction. "People don't fail," he says. "Events fail." People learn. His unfailing response to any statement that has even a hint of negativism: "Up until now."