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

It sounds like bad ad copy. And it isn't how folks in Dearborn, Michigan are accustomed to talking to one another -- until now, that is. Rapidly, almost comically, since his arrival last October, Winkler's stock phrases have infused the deepest reaches of Ford Credit.

Greg Smith, 49, president, Ford Credit North America: "We have a small subsidiary, AMI Leasing, in Worcester, Massachusetts. It's not at all in the corporate mainstream. I visited last month for a business review, and every person in the room was wearing a button with one of the language tools: 'But to and.' 'Up until now.' Not only had they heard and grasped them all, they each had embraced the specific tool that he or she was having trouble with. At our Fairlane operation in Colorado Springs, there is a jar sitting on a table. Every time someone says, 'but,' that person puts a dollar in the jar."

Winkler's language is the language of "breakthrough leadership." It is the strategy for organizational change that he has developed and preached, in one form or another, for nearly three decades. It is a way of thinking that was born of his need, as an engineer and as a dyslexic, for extreme systemization -- and, too, of his need for perpetual reexamination and continual improvement. It is the lever that he hopes will revolutionize Ford Credit and, in a perfect world, Ford Motor Co. as well.

Breakthrough leadership began, essentially, in 1972 at a General Instruments factory. Winkler was a newly minted electrical engineer designing new microelectronic circuits. Compelled to ask questions, to understand everything completely, he was constantly on the production floor, schmoozing with the people on the prototype line. Together, they set up a "white room," a place where his designs could be critiqued and tested. The result: Winkler's projects came in far faster and yielded far higher productivity than those of his colleagues. General Instruments made him its worldwide-operations manager when he was 26 years old.

Winkler began writing about everything, taking meticulous notes to help him visualize his thoughts. He thought a lot about purpose -- and then about how his personal mission drove his goals. "If it works for me," he realized, "it should work for the business too." The organization should produce a statement of purpose, he thought. It should work together to map its goals and its strategy. It must harness the energy of every individual.

In 1976, Winkler took such nascent thinking to Citibank, which had recruited him as vice president for its corporate-trust business. He took over an operation of 1,000 people who were pushing around massive piles of paper -- with a rework rate on that paper of 20%. He took one group of workers aside and told them to invent their own ideal environment. He told them to ask themselves, "How do we break out of the box we're stuck in?" The workers figured it out. Productivity soared.

Alan Weber, 51, vice chairman, Aetna Inc.: "Don worked for me in operations at Citibank. He's not motivated by money but by success. He wants to accomplish and to get recognition for what he accomplishes. Maybe it's because when he was a kid he had to sit in the back of the classroom. But accomplishment and recognition are what really turn him on. He'll work 24 hours a day to get that. He always views himself as the underdog. He likes to surface from out of nowhere and win."

Winkler refined breakthrough leadership at Bank One Corp., which hired him in 1993 to build its Finance One credit subsidiary. He thrived, according to people who worked with him then, by embracing the unconventional: He fused together the indirect-lending units of roughly 70 Bank One affiliates; sold home-equity loans to the less-than-creditworthy customers whom Bank One itself had turned away; and launched an online auto-lending program with CarsDirect.com Inc. Before leaving the company amid a mass exodus of top executives last year, he had turned a humdrum organization with $10 billion in assets into a $45 billion leviathan that enjoyed nearly 30% annual earnings growth.

Breakthrough leadership, Winkler says, is about creating "something that would not have happened otherwise and something that will never go back to the way it was. Leadership is about taking people to places that they wouldn't have gotten to by themselves."

The process begins with an annual reevaluation of strategic vision, purpose, and values. Put people in a room together, and get them to question themselves and one another. Why are we here? What will it look like when our purpose has been realized? What do we see when we imagine a successful end? "We need to establish the vision," Winkler says, "so that we can share it with others in the organization. You can tell when chisel has met wood in a purpose statement. It actually becomes the working surface for everything that follows. It allows you to set direction. It's the rudder on a sailboat."