The change imperative facing Ford Motor Company was massive: integrate 340,000 employees separated by fiercely independent fiefdoms spread across 200 countries. Synchronize all teams, divisions, and regions into one global entity. Instill in all employees the need to think and act as if they owned the whole company. Why? So that Ford can excel in the global economy, and satisfy increasingly demanding consumers.

How did Ford create such “corporate DNA that drives how we do things everywhere”? How does it ensure that every individual understands the why and how of Ford’s new direction?

Surprisingly, by teaching. But not academically, with consultants in classrooms. Rather, with in-house leaders reaching out to every corner of the company with teachable points of view—“documents written by people to explain their theories about competition and success.” Ford uses these all the time—in story-telling, in project planning, in teaching programs reaching over 55,000 people; and in e-mails to 100,000 employees.

The Idea in Practice
The Teachable Point of View

Noel Tichy, a consultant to Ford, thinks of the teachable point of view document as the “antidote to the ‘black box’ … that conceals the origins of good ideas and important insights.” Teachable points of view include:

• Ideas—beliefs a leader holds about what will make the company profitable
• Values—personal values as well as values the leader uses to set business goals (for example, sharing knowledge across divisions)
• Emotional energy—how to motivate people (for example, by explaining the competitive context of their work)
• Edge—an individual’s distinctive thought processes for making tough calls (for example, how to make decisions about an unethical employee)

The Power of Teaching
This type of teaching makes leaders’ implicit knowledge explicit. It opens it up for questioning and refining. And it rapidly reaches thousands of people. Nasser articulated his teachable point of view, taught it to 200 leaders, who taught it to 1,500, who taught it to 55,000—all within a few years.

Living and Breathing Change
This type of teaching also enforces the discipline of change. “Once you start to teach … with your own people leading the effort, the teachers themselves have no choice but to behave differently. You’ve gotten up in front of your people, and said, ‘This is what I believe. This is how we should run the business.’ After that, it’s very hard to disown yourself from the change process.”

Capstone: One of Ford’s Teaching Programs
During a teaching program called Capstone, four strategic challenges are assigned to small teams of executives. To start the process, Nasser and his team share their teachable points of view. They also have team-building exercises, 360-degree feedback, coaching, and intense conversations about the challenges. When the teams complete their work, each participant receives extensive feedback on his or her performance from fellow participants as well as the top team.

“That intensity is energizing. And when it’s all over, the Capstone participants are asked to create their own teachable points of view. . . . Capstone is about learning, but its results have been anything but academic…. With [all] the teaching programs we’ve used over the past three years, our people have delivered $2 billion to our bottom line.”

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