Mindful that he was challenging a century of bureaucratic orthodoxy, Ballarin urged his audience to think big. âWhy,â he asked, âcouldnât Michelin be the Toyota of the twenty-first centuryâa company that brought the world a new management model by enlarging the freedom and accountability of every employee?
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The goal was to build commitment rather than force the adoption of detailed protocols. Ballarin understood that real change happens through persuasion and persistence, not via mandates and metrics. As Michelinâs apostle of autonomy, Ballarin traveled from plant to plant looking for believers and converts. He knew it was their support, more than anything else, that would ultimately determine whether his mission flourished or floundered.
In every respect, Ballarinâs approach to responsibilization met the critical tests that face any attempt to upend the bureaucratic status quo:
- It was anchored in timeless human values
- It provided ample space for improvisation
- It routed around points of resistance
- It invited, rather than demanded, leaders to reimagine their roles
- It minimized risk and disruption
For all these reasons, responsibilization gained enough runway to reach takeoff speed.
Like Michelin, every company must chart its own path to humanocracy. Nonetheless, itâs reassuring to know that you donât need a legion of consultants, or a massive corporate change program, to get started. In fact, as weâll see, those may be the last things you need.
Even when an organization is led by a pioneering CEO like Jan Wallander or Zhang Ruimin, crafting a new management model is more about âdiscover and testâ than âengineer and impose.
Peter saw no problem with a system in which he and the analysts who worked for him made so many of the companyâs decisions. Meanwhile, businesses around us were adapting to a world that was changing at blinding speed. We needed to change, we needed to be more nimble, and we needed to do it soon.
As Lou Gerstner says, âChanging the attitude and behavior of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish. You canât simply give a couple of speeches or write a new credo for the company and declare that the new culture has taken hold. You canât mandate it, canât engineer it.
âWhat you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But at some point you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesnât change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.