Business Week had an article talking about Alan Mulally’s stint at Ford recently. What was interesting was the cultural insights and some of the tools that are being employed to try and keep the ship off the shoals. Here is a collection of out-of-context quotes and my commentary on them.

  • Under Mulally, decision-making is more transparent, once-fractious divisions are working together, and cars of better quality are moving faster from design studio to showroom. So, more agile
  • But he was criticized for leaving too much of his team out of the loop. Mulally, they said, needed to check in more often to let his reports know if they were headed in the right directions. Internal communication. Shocking.
  • Managers commonly held ‘pre-meetings,’ where they schemed how to get their stories straight for higher-ups
  • Information should never be used as a weapon on a team
  • Mulally was determined to have a constant stream of data that would give his team a weekly snapshot of Ford’s global operations. Seems a lot like burn-down and/or big visible charts
  • Mulally has imposed discipline on a company that veered from one strategy to the next. Discipline at an organizational level is needed if there is any hope at organizational quality