AssociationOkie

There was a great little note in the July 27th issue of USA Today. Here is what it said:
Mulally: It’s OK not to be OK

Ford CEO Alan Mulally recounts an episode that makes him certain Ford has broken unworkable old
In one of his Thursday management meetings, where managers are supposed to show color-coded charts, red for serious problems, yellow for lesser issues, green for all OK, “all the charts were green and I know — we’re going to lose $17 billion. I stopped the meeting and I said, ‘Is there anything that isn’t going well? We’re losing $17 billion.’ Eye contact goes down to the ground.”
Mulally: “The next week here comes Mark (Fields, now president of Ford’s North and South America operations) and the charts are all red. Everybody else’s were green. I started to clap, and I said ‘That’s great.’
“I looked around and said, ‘Is there anything we can do to help'” resolve problems Fields was having launching the Ford Edge.
A dam burst. Other managers started tossing out solutions to similar problems they’d had.
Even so, managers took two weeks to follow the Fields example. “Next week everybody still was green, but (two weeks later) the entire 320 charts (of all the managers) looked like a rainbow. Everybody knew it was safe” to ask for help.
“At that moment I knew, and everybody else knew, that we had a chance now. You can’t manage a secret. It was all out in the open. And everybody was committed to helping everybody else.”

Boy did that hit home. How many of us are willing to carry our troubles into the board room in full color? Most of us, and I include myself in that list, hope to gloss over the true challenges, in hopes of solving the, before they destroy us.
But wouldn’t we all be more effective, if we just laid our challenges out? Showed our Reds and Yellows, not just our Greens?
We spend tremendous energy recruiting and training our board members, and then we fail to use them as a true resource. If we lay out the problems, maybe, just maybe, they can help turn the red to yellow, and the yellow to green.
And by the way, I feel a lot better about Ford (as a stockholder) since I read this.

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