Why the little exceptions leaders make are never actually small. In the 1970s, engineers at Ford knew the Pinto’s fuel tank design had a serious flaw. In certain rear-end collisions, the tank could rupture and the car could catch fire. The leadership team ran the numbers. They weighed the projected cost of settling the wrongful … Read more
Before you can lead people anywhere, you have to know where you’re going — and so do they. Alice comes to a fork in the road and looks up at the Cheshire Cat. She asks which way she ought to go from here. The Cat answers that it depends a good deal on where she … Read more
As I’ve described earlier, West Point and the Army made deliberate decisions to move from a culture of compliance to a culture of commitment, from measuring who could survive to investing in who could lead. That is a culture turnaround. It is one of the most transparent examples I know of what large-scale culture change … Read more
Defining The Culture of Commitment Not long ago, I was working with a car dealership General Manager who told me a story I have never forgotten. He was walking his service bays at the end of a long workday when he stopped to talk to one of the technicians (a young man named Jack, as … Read more
