Unlocking excellence: Lessons from Michelin
Good morning everyone
It is good to be back. I have missed writing to you. I hope that you had a good break. If this is the first time you’re reading Strategy, Soul and Self – welcome! Here are the most popular issues of 2021.
Over December, a number of you asked me for book suggestions. Those questions inspired me to write My Favourites of 2021. Let us know what your favourites were.
My year ended with Roxanne and artist, Luke Williams, persuading me that Amber Alcock’s painting of Fluffy needed to come home. My rubber art-buying arm was easily twisted and so the 2m by 1.6m giant now has pride of place in our hallway. On the subject of acquisitions, African Art Scene advisory services were lucky (and smart) enough to acquire this gorgeous piece by one of my favourite artists, Matthew Hindley.
The year started with the fantastic, and well-deserved, news that Marlon and Rene Parker, regular readers of this letter, and the founders and leaders of the amazing RLabs were awarded the Social Innovator of the Year Award for 2022, by the globally prestigious Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.
RLabs operates with the core purpose of ‘Making Hope Contagious’ through skills training and technology solutions. If you’ve engaged with them, or one of the thousands of young people who RLabs have touched, you will instantly be inspired by their energy and impact.
2022 is going to be a tricky year. This year will undoubtedly be different from the preceding two. Yet equally the world has changed, whatever this year is, it definitely won’t be a carbon copy of 2019. How can we manage this uncertainty?
The first is simply doing what we’ve just done – acknowledging it! It will be uncertain. If we know that we can act accordingly. Then experimenting and persevering are powerful tools in managing uncertainty. Experiments help us learn what is feasible. Uncertainty is emotionally tough; it’s always tempting to give up – sometimes too soon. Persevering gives us the time and data to learn more. Today’s letter explores those themes.
Strategy
In their recent book Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini explain how over the last 9 years Michelin has steadily been increasing the authority and accountability of front-line workers in a programme called ‘responsibilization.’
Our focus isn’t on what the programme does but on how it was implemented. I am doing so because our uncertain world will require us to make changes but doing so can seem overwhelming and so we avoid it. The team at Michelin provide us with insights as to how one can steadily and intentionally seed change over time.
The essence of the programme was this. In the mid-2000s Michelin launched a corporate-led effort to standardise manufacturing processes across all their operations. By 2010 key executives were worried that the business was losing its soul, and it was clearly losing its ability to be creative and flexible (Remember Netflix founder, Reed Hastings’ description of how his first company failed?). And so, in 2013, an executive, Bertrand Ballarin, started to explore how one might decentralise decision-making to frontline production staff.
Ballarin used 7 principles to guide implementation:
- Participation would be voluntary.
- Frontline teams would design experiments by answering two questions: ‘What decisions could we make without the intervention of supervisors?’ and ‘What problems could we solve without involving support functions?’
- The teams would be average performers so that it was possible to ensure that the results could be generalised.
- The teams focussed their efforts on one or two areas in which they would expand autonomy.
- They were given a full year to run the experiment. This enabled them to refine and deepen their processes and learning.
- The experimenters still had to meet their operational commitments – this helped keep it real.
- Management would only get involved if asked – ensuring full autonomy and responsibility.
At the end of the year, Ballarin pulled all the teams together to share their experiences answering four questions:
- What specifically changed?
- How did this compare with existing practice?
- Why was the change important?
- What were the critical enablers?
He then took the results to a senior leadership strategy session. He did two things there. First, he gave them a vision. He asked them “Why couldn’t Michelin be the Toyota of the twenty-first century – a company that brings the world a new management model?” Second, he asked for permission to extend his experiment to two full plants and to do so for five years. Inspired by the results and the vision, he got permission for six plants.
The key was winning permission for targeted experiments and then using the results to expand further. He didn’t try to change everything all at once. He didn’t force anyone, he got volunteers. He ensured that the learning was consolidated and shared. He didn’t dictate what to do, but rather explained how to approach the situation, which created the space for the frontline teams to create solutions that met their unique situations.
Hamel and Zanini reflect that Ballarin’s methodical approach with generous timeframes coupled to his insistence on still delivering the baseline results created the space for improvisation.
2022 will demand change in how we run our organisations and our lives.
What are the sticking areas in your business and how might you use some of these insights to create experiments that generate insights that allow you to become more effective? Don’t try to solve it all in one go. What from Michelin’s approach can you emulate in your business or life?
Self
When Ballarin was seeding new ways of operating for Michelin, he first secured a commitment for a year of experimentation and then for five years. He has consistently pursued the transformation of Michelin’s approach to manufacturing for close to a decade. Anything meaningful takes time.
One of my favourite books last year was Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light (thank you to Dylan Voogt, founder of Stage 5 Films, for recommending it). I will return to it in greater detail in the future, for today I want to share this aspect.
Stone served in the Vietnam war, returning to the US in late 1968, but it was not until 1976 that he sat down to start writing what eventually became the Oscar-award-winning film, Platoon. In ’76, he had recently ended a long-term relationship and was living in a tiny room in a friend’s shabby third-floor walk-up in downtown Manhattan.
He reflects that as he wrote his memories kept expanding and he began to understand his Vietnam experience on a deeper level. Revisiting one’s past in writing does this. It leads you down a path where old memories return anew, and you view them from a new vantage point. Give it a try – you’ll be amazed. Invariably it allows you to see new possibilities.
He wrote the first draft in a few weeks. He says “I knew it was good, solid work – maybe some of the best stuff I’d done yet. Maybe it was the famed lotus flower sprung from the mud and the shit of that awful war.”
He left New York for L.A. hoping to make Platoon. It took ten years with multiple false starts. He reflects that by the time he got it made, he’d given up on it.
Nevertheless, in March 1986, Stone flew to Manila to start shooting Platoon. It went on to win the Oscar for best picture in 1986 and he won the Oscar for best director.
As the film gathered momentum and acclaim, Stone reflected “The movie had its own wings now; they were built years before in Danny’s small New York apartment, where a dreamer, quite broke, wrote down this flow of ideas, based on a combination of personal experience and his love of Greek mythology. That screenplay lasted, and it was the key to this moment, the thread through the labyrinth that had gotten me out into the light of day. I must never forget that.”
Stone confronted a decade of uncertainty on his journey to making a film that shifted the world. He was on the brink of bankruptcy, nearly 40 with some big disappointments behind him, and his persistence paid off. This year, and the next few, will be challenging. Find your thread that you can follow through the labyrinth to the light of day and persist, one foot in front of the other, you’ll find your way.
Soul
As we look ahead, Gandhi’s words are a good reminder for us: “Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.”
I hope that you have a wonderful year.
Best wishes and love to you and yours
Karl
PS: You can learn more about my coaching practice here.
(This letter was first sent on 23 Jan 2022)