A Lesson in Leadership from Muhammad Ali

Before his fight with Henry Cooper, Muhammad Ali trash talked, 'This is no jive, Cooper shall go in five.'  Everyone assumed that he was simply trying to unnerve his opponent.  That’s true, but he had a more important goal as well.  And he was far from the first person in history to set it.

When Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico, he turned his army toward the sea and forced them to watch as he sank the ships which had brought them from Cuba.  His message was clear.  There would be no retreat. 

Whether you think he was a hero or a villain, Cortes was a great leader.  His army went on to conquer all of Mexico against overwhelming odds.

Henry Ford used this same technique when he switched his factories from the old school craft production to the assembly line.  In craft production workers would build a single car from start to finish.  They would bend, file, or chisel the incoming parts until they fit.  As a result, each car was unique and costs were high.

One of the prerequisites for the assembly line was that all the incoming parts had to fit perfectly, the first time.  This required an immense amount of work to ensure that suppliers met Ford’s specifications.  When a supplier couldn’t or wouldn’t meet specifications, Ford built his own parts factory.

When the time came for a Ford factory to be converted from craft production to assembly line, Ford took away all of their files, chisels, and pry bars.  Any ill fitting parts would be glaringly obvious.  The plant shut down until the problem was fixed at the source. 

There would be no retreat.  Everyone knew it.  They had to make the new system work.  And work it did.  When the first pilot plant for producing magnetos was transformed to the new assembly line method, productivity went up by 400% in the first year.  The benefits continued to mount in the ensuing years.

As powerful as Ford’s no-retreat strategy was on attitudes after the conversion, perhaps its greatest impact was on on himself and his managers before the conversion.  Ford, like Muhammad Ali, knew that preparation had to be done right, both mentally and physically:

• Vendors had to know the exact dimensions of the parts they would supply
• Gauges and standards had to be in place
• Workers had to be trained
• Equipment had to be installed in exactly the right configuration
• The list can go on forever

The level of organization required in assembly line production is orders of magnitude higher than in craft production.  If everything doesn’t fit together exactly, the benefits disappear.  Because of Ford’s no-retreat policy, managers knew that there would be no place to hide if the planning was not thorough.

There are many similarities between Ford’s assembly line and the Quality System that FDA regulated industries must use.  The assembly line is a highly organized system that converts thousands of parts into a functioning car once every minute.  A Quality System is a set of procedures that converts uncountable bits of unusable data into functional packages of information.

In either case, any defect in a raw material or the process can affect the whole system.

In our work as FDA regulatory consultants we have seen some great leaders and some…well, not so great.  Some companies are highly successful in complying with FDA regulations.  Others struggle on forever and always find themselves backsliding to square one.  Many leaders in our industry find themselves in positions where they need to upgrade compliance.

There is one trait that unifies those leaders who do well.  When they implement an improved quality system, they make it clear to everyone that there will be no retreat; no winks of the eye “while we’re getting started” with the new procedures. 

This type of management style, although inflicting great pain in the short term, is cheaper in the long run, because the discontinuities in the systems become very visible and cannot be ignored.

That means that as painful as the new requirements are, everyone knows that the old way is gone.  If, for instance, the new system means that a particular production line is down until a CAPA (Corrective And Preventive Action) completed, then everyone bites the bullet.

You may not have the opportunity to conquer a country like Cortes, or transform industry, like Ford.  But when you implement change in your organization – even small changes, take a lesson from them, adopt a no-retreat policy.  Send that message to your organization, but more importantly, like Muhammad Ali, send it to yourself.