Above all, however, independence implies cutting a mental umbilical cord. When confronted with a situation you must break with the assumption that someone else will take charge, and do something about it yourself. Independence requires a new mindset.

This is precisely the motivating force behind the Visteon Leadership Development Program. Since it was spun off from Ford in 2000, Visteon, the second largest automotive supplier in the world, is having to develop skills which were previously a Ford prerogative. Given the changes and volatility within the automotive sector, Visteon also needs to find new ways of functioning in order to be flexible enough to adapt quickly. To do this, it needs to break with the corporate culture of the past and a find a voice of its own.

Of the three, the latter probably presents the greatest challenge. Management literature shows time and time again that the greatest obstacle to any process of change is people. “Through factors such as experience, education, corporate culture, level of responsibility, etc., human beings generate a framework for assessing, analyzing and acting upon information. Frameworks provide a yearned-for coherence and stability. But, once established, also limit the range of possibilities and hence become a barrier to change,” explains Paddy Miller, Academic Director of the program.

Out of the comfort zone

“The program is designed to break away from the existing framework by, on one hand, presenting participants with new concepts, and on the other, putting them in positions where they have to take decisions quickly, out of their comfort zone, and with a limited amount of information,” he continues.

“In doing this, Visteon required a business school which was also prepared to break their framework by doing things differently,” says Rory Simpson, director of the Department of International Executive Education. Thus, apart from classroom sessions, activities in the program include dividing participants into groups and getting them to design, build and race a vehicle with limited materials or cooking paella without a recipe. On the academic front, all the information can be obtained on a web site created specifically for the program and participants actively take their own notes rather than passively expecting information in the form of a program binder.

New Ideas

The program controls and ensures that participants are taking on new ideas through a red-thread review at the end of each day. Participants are debriefed on what they have learned and fill out a Learning Log, which allows them to register the insights they have gained in a systematic manner.

In at least one sense, Visteon has a good chance to succeed. The people most interested in change are those who one would assume would be the most reluctant – its leaders. The involvement of the top management in this program is to say the least impressive. Not only have the Senior Vice-President Bob Marcin and President of Europe and South America flown in especially to exchange views with participants, but Visteon´s President Michael Johnson also came in for the first group. Traditionally a very hierarchical company, what better way of demonstrating changing attitudes and times?

Given this commitment, it is only natural that Visteon should demand an equal level of involvement from its executive development provider. This is in fact their stated reason for choosing IESE above stiff competition. The program couldn’t be more tailor-made if one tried. Not only have Professors Ahmad Rahnema & Luis Palencia written a finance case specifically for the program, but other faculty members have visited the company on numerous occasions to obtain relevant information for their sessions. In addition, Paddy Miller interviewed Visteon´s top management to ensure that the content chosen by the faculty was aligned with the issues Visteon was interested in bringing to the fore.

The great effort to design and deliver this program seems to have paid off. Initially Visteon had foreseen two pilot programs in 2002 with an additional three in 2003. Given the success of the two pilot programs, Visteon has now decided to increase the number of editions in 2003 to a total of nine. As one of the participants Hervé Montloin, Mgf Planning Manager, stated: “It was as if IESE was a part of Visteon, almost perfectly tailored.”