BMW: Driven by Design

Boyke Boyer, head of exterior design, recalls that BMW's design team was woefully unprepared for this new world. A rumpled man with tousled silver hair, a two-day beard, and a big laugh, Boyer is a 30-year veteran of BMW. Sitting in his office at the FIZ, chain-smoking Marlboros, he says that at the time of Bangle's arrival, the design team was near the bottom of the corporate food chain. The designers had worked for two years without a design director; they lacked a leader to champion their cause and nurture a point of view. As a result, the team fell under the thumb of BMW's justly famous engineering department. "You'd never have a voice at meetings," Boyer exclaims, waving his hands dismissively. "The attitude was, 'Oh, those designers, pshh, pshh. They're nothing but a bunch of picture makers!' "

Not surprisingly, BMW design stagnated. The German auto press sometimes derided its conservative approach as "eine Wurst, drei Größe" -- "one sausage, three different lengths" -- implying that its cars were cast from the same mold. "When we'd launch new models at an automobile exhibition," explains Boyer, "our colleagues from competing companies would come by and say, 'Are those all of your ideas? What do you do all day?' We couldn't tell them that we'd tried radical approaches but they had all been turned down."

BMW won't comment on why it recruited Bangle, but it's clear that the company had to quash the practice of grinding out different-sized sausages. To ensure a future of successful styling at BMW, Bangle and his team would have to expand the palette and develop a distinct look and feel for each model. But first he had to meet an even tougher challenge: Find a way to elevate the department to the same lofty level as the engineers. Design had to speak with a forceful voice throughout the 97,000-person company. Which meant that Bangle had to speak forcefully for design.

Behold the Invisible Man
BMW wraps everything relating to its R&D efforts in a veil of secrecy, and the selection of its new design chief was no exception. The October 1992 announcement that Bangle had won the prestigious position was sudden and unexpected. The auto press was incredulous. Even though he was the director of the Fiat Design Centre, in Turin, Italy, none of the models that bear his imprint -- notably the Coupe Fiat of 1993 and the Alfa Romeo 145 of 1994 -- had made their debut yet. Outside of European design circles, Bangle was largely an unknown -- and an American, no less. One magazine promptly dubbed him the Invisible Man.

Bangle says that he was humbled to have won the job, and no doubt he was. But his humility might in part have been a subtle ploy to win over BMW's senior designers -- possibly a gambit to lead them by first letting them lead him. At the same time, Bangle had to find a way to fend off the suffocating effects of what he calls the "Festung [fortress] design culture" that permeated the FIZ. BMW is the antithesis of the boundless organization. Hierarchies and lines of authority are a real, even physical presence at BMW, especially so at its vaunted R&D center. Visitors are required to surrender their passports at the front desk; they must then walk through a labyrinth of corridors and electronically alarmed doors before gaining entry to the design studios. And no outsiders -- not even employees from other departments -- are allowed inside the center unaccompanied. When they are finally invited in, their entrance is accompanied by a loud, less-than-welcoming shouted greeting: "Outsiders!"

It was Bangle's responsibility to safeguard the creative process while simultaneously building bridges to the rest of the organization. His first step was to push his designers to take risks -- and to be prepared to defend the results. "Leaders dare to take you to where you don't want to go," he exclaims. "And that's true for a design department. People tend to work backward into their comfort zones, and they have to be prodded out of them."

Bangle also set out to build what he calls a dutzen culture: an open, informal place where people aren't afraid to say what they really think. "Chris expects people to disagree with him from time to time," explains Sabine Zemelka, head of material and color design. "We can all get pretty impassioned about the decision making, and there's a reason for it: We understand that good design comes from making the right choices."

Then there was the matter of working effectively with the engineers. Instead of attempting to conquer engineering -- to bend it to a design point of view -- Bangle half-jokingly says that he tried to co-opt it. He made his move in 1996, when he formed a project team that was led jointly by a designer and an engineer and was composed of members from both groups. He carved out a seven-figure budget and sent the team to work in the United States at a secret location of its own choosing. He called the project "Deep Blue."