Page 50 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

Make Everyone’s Dreams Come True 31

■ Use the storytelling technique as a method to assist teams in launch-
ing projects.

A Shared Vision

When Jerry McColgin agreed to take on the job as leader of the Whirlpool
team, he drew on past experience. He had headed up a team whose struc-
ture and way of operating were entirely company-mandated. “We did not
have full-time dedicated resources,” Jerry explained, “the engineers on
whom I was dependent actually reported to the engineering department in
their respective locations.” Furthermore, he had been asked to work with
a lot of part-time people. The people on the project had lacked cohesion
and a unity of purpose. If Jerry came to them and explained what should
be done, they would agree, but when they discussed it with their depart-
ment heads, the answer was, “That’s all very good and fine, but here’s how
we’re really going to do it.” It had been an international project with no
contribution from the targeted markets. As a result, the project failed.
McColgin was determined that there would not be another failure.
When the company tried to tell him how the project was to be run, he
dug in his heels. He believed that he now knew how to create a successful
team. This time, he brought together an international group of people and
announced that there would be no part-time participation and no divided
loyalties. From the outset, the team would be unified in a shared vision.
The company was also building a new plant in Pune, India, to manu-
facture the product. Among its many goals, the team was to design the
equipment, figure out costs, and plan the marketing, all for a number of
different countries. All these countries needed representation on the team,
whose numbers included engineers, designers, and finance experts speaking
different languages and coming from dissimilar cultures. Style differences
between the members were apparent at the beginning of the project. Yet
people from Brazil, China, Italy, and India would all be sitting next to one
another every day and working together. Their main goal was to develop
the model for a common refrigerator that could be built around the world.
As a selling point, it was also to be manufactured with a frost-free freezing
compartment—hence the name of the team, the Global No-Frost Team.