A friend communicated a story to me about Alan Mulally, the former CEO of the Ford Motor Company. When Mulally first joined the organization, he gathered his senior management team together to identified what needed to change at Ford.
In a nutshell, Mulally asked his team to colour-code their initiatives:
- Red – things were in bad shape
- Yellow – an initative wasn’t going well
- Green – an initiative was on track
He wanted his team to be straightforward when presenting their reports so they could figure out the solutions.
Everyone’s reports were nothing but green. No red or yellow in sight. Keep in mind, at the time Ford had lost billions of dollars.
One of the world’s pre-eminent experts on quality and process improvements, Subir Chowdhury is the #1 international bestselling author on SIX SIGMA philosophy. Hailed by The New York Times as a “leading Quality expert,” and by Business Week as “the Quality Prophet”, he is the author of 15 books. His latest book THE DIFFERENCE: When Good Enough Isn’t Enough (Crown Business, 2017) made it to the USA Today Bestseller list as well as National Bestseller in India. In 2017, India’s prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur established the ‘Subir Chowdhury School of Quality and Reliability’ – the first of its kind in Asia. He is the Chairman and CEO of ASI Consulting Group and helped his clients save billions of dollars.