The importance of people to a successful business is (I hope) a universally acknowledged truth. It is therefore a topic that has featured in some form or other in many of my weekly blogs, and I have pulled three together here that cover different dimensions that might be considered contradictory to a degree. The importance of strong leaders implies that without this, the business will lack direction. Recruiting good people, and then developing them to reach their full potential suggests that a business can be self-driving to some extent. And if you need strong leaders and capable individuals throughout the business, then does that not imply teamwork is likely to suffer?
Exceptional leaders
Whether we liked them as individuals or not, I think everyone would accept that there are some auto industry leaders who made an exceptional impact on the businesses they led. Would the VW Group exist today without the strong direction set by Ferdinand Piech? Could BYD and Tesla have grown to become direct rivals for the largest BEV manufacturer in the world without the respective drives of Stella Li and Elon Musk (recognising that Stella Li is not actually the CEO). Would Stellantis exist if Sergio Marchionne had not applied his financial engineering skills to create FCA as one of the two constituent parts of the larger group? Given the current situation of Stellantis, you might argue that Marchionne’s judgement was flawed, but he set a strong and positive direction before he had to resign due to ill health. That naturally takes us to Carlos Tavares, undoubtedly a strong leader, somewhat in the mould of Piech, but perhaps overly focused on costs and not sufficiently addressing how the complex product portfolio could be differentiated in the way that Piech did so well in the VW Group.
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