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Whole-Scale Change™ :Toolkit

Preface

A number of years ago I was in the change business at Ford Motor Company, and I was in trouble. I had been working for two years at the manufacturing plant level - all 80 of them, in fact - as part of the team that had helped bring the turnaround in the company's approach to building a quality CAR once more. I was in trouble because I had been handed a big challenge by a very far-seeing Executive Vice President: what was the breakthrough in managing whole businesses, which would match the breakthrough in managing the quality effort?

The executive, Tom Page, and I had agreed that his ten businesses - good size businesses, with revenues (in 1981 dollars) of between $1 and $3 billion, would take part in a very large change effort over the next year. One business at a time would be challenged with changing the way it was managed. Despite the staggering losses still being registered in the car industry, Tom agreed to the (then) audacious notion that one to two hundred managers at a time would turn over their headquarters and field operations to third level subordinates, so that the entire intact management structure of the business could go off-site for a week and re-think their world.

He had given me, as a change agent, an incredible opportunity. And I had blown it.

I was in trouble for two reasons. First, although I had seen with my own eyes the fact that managing people differently lay at the heart of the quality story (by then a story told over and over in the national press), I wasn't seeing the simple parallel with managing executives differently if you wanted a better business outcome.

Second, although I knew that nobody had TRAINED quality into anyone at Ford, I was just dumb enough to have spent a fair amount of time and money with a group of well-meaning but patronizing college professors whose aim and approach it was to TRAIN fully adult executives into being better business managers. Oh, they could talk about business cases, and ROI, and the elements of strategy, but what it boiled down to was that the professors had the answers and the "students" were going to be taught them.

I knew I was in trouble when, halfway through the second day of a pilot of this business seminar, the room (made up of change agent colleagues from all over Ford) was awash in pity - pity for me, pity for the professors, and most of all, pity for any poor fool who might actually have to sit through a whole week of this approach. (By then, of course, the grapevine at Ford being what it was at all companies, the word was out: this seminar STUNK.)

What all of us (except the professors) in that room were suddenly seeing was that Ford had been taught on the plant floor - by its employees - what the zestful pursuit of new learning looked like. And it certainly wasn't done this way. We were used to a far messier, but more potent, way. We were used to debate, and challenge, identifying what we could improve first, and what would have the highest leverage and pay-off. We were used to teams calling for specialists if they thought their expertise was needed. Nobody thought they were being trained; they thought they were calling for briefings as they pursued a significant competitive advantage.

Why had I thought that executives had lower standards?

My insight about what I should have done, or at least what I should have looked for when it came to the right approach for these ten business teams, arrived before the second day of the pilot was over. But it was a little late. I had a calendar that said we were to go live in 4 weeks with the first 130-person management team, with the nine other businesses following in a brisk line-up. I hadn't endured Day 3 of my own pilot, but I already knew I had no program.

I also realized that I didn't have a model for what I was doing with these executives, as I had on the plant level. And I didn't have the right professors. In fact, I now knew I didn't want professors. In my Ford network, I knew a few people who had worked with groups larger than 20, but they were used to working on the plant floor and they thought I was crazy to be working with an intact power structure. I knew consultants who had helped in the Quality movement, but they only operated with small groups.

I didn't know who I needed - I just knew they needed to help me design something for a whole business at a time, something that would startle and delight and compel executives the way the manufacturing world of Ford had come to embrace the pursuit of quality. I needed lion tamers with a sense of humor. And heart.

Enter the team who got me out of trouble: Kathie Dannemiller, Chuck Tyson, Alan Davenport, and Bruce Gibb. They hadn't worked together as a group before, but they come together as if in answer to a prayer…(actually, in answer to me describing to a friend my need for lion tamers as opposed to professors!)

Over the next three weeks, they designed an event, which went on to become memorable in the lives of the participating executives, and ultimately changed the Ford Motor Company. Business after business went through the five day session, and whether it was the Plastics group, or Electronics, or Casting, or Land Development, or Aerospace, the executives came to understand each other, the competition, and the market for the first time as a coherent, energized, focused and aligned whole. They created strategic plans that they all owned, and they amended management structures and decisions-making practices to support their goals.

This is not the place to recount the next two years of Ford Motor Company history; nor mine, even through we had a glorious time improving ourselves. But I will say that the seminar became famous internally; the President of Ford, Donald Petersen, decided to use its principles extensively when the company embarked on its global strategy. He continued doing so after becoming Chairman of Ford, as did his successors. Much of the publicity given to Ford's turnaround centered on the people issues which began to be understood and practiced in these sessions.

The book that you are reading contains the principles and practices, which those marvelous consultants designed for Ford, and then took so successfully to many other companies. I continued to use them throughout my career at Ford, and now find them invaluable wherever I consult. What I like about Dannemiller Tyson as a firm is their passion to pass on what has been discovered to work; sharing breakthroughs generously has always been their ***hallmark. May your experience with these methods bring you the success and SATISFACTION that it has brought me.

Nancy Lloyd Badore
Executive Director
Ford Motor Company (ret.)
Dearborn, Michigan
November 1999

Table of Contents

Overview What is Whole-Scale®?
Chapter 1 Discovering the Magic of Whole Scale®
Chapter 2 Designing a Whole-Scale® Meeting
Chapter 3 Facilitating: Whole-Scale® Style
Chapter 4 Logistics: Freeing Participants to be Creative
Chapter 5 Design Possibilities: A Generic Three-Day Event Plan
Chapter 6 Alternative Designs: Possibilities for Specific Whole-Scale® Interventions
Chapter 7 The Real Secrets of Whole-Scale®