MAKE PROJECTS THE SCHOOL FOR LEADERS

Leadership is the key to developing great products - products that sur prise and delight customers. To achieve that goal, all the technical e lements of a product must work well together as a system - the manufac turing process must produce everything that the design requires and th e product must be delivered to customers in an outstanding fashion. An d if the development of a great product is not an isolated case-if one great product is followed by another and another - the result is a gr eat enterprise. Leadership is the key to achieving that kind of consis tency. Eastman Kodak's FunSaver camera and Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet p rinter are examples of development efforts that created great products . Each became the basis for a whole family of products that has create d a significant business for its company. All the successful projects that the Manufacturing Vision Group studied had powerful guiding visio ns for business strategy, project, and product. Moreover, the three vi sions were mutually reinforcing, energizing the people on the teams, f ocusing attention and effort on the right things, and getting them don e in the right way. The challenge for companies is to find and develop the right kind of people to lead development projects and to expand s ignificantly their capacity for leadership. The Manufacturing Vision G roup discovered that in the companies where leadership thrives, senior managers consistently do three things: they expect leadership, they s upport leaders, and they reward leaders.