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representation to provide its input. In fact, Teerlink had assumed that the interests of the top management team and middle management were the same: “We didn’t include the salaried [managers and the administrative personnel]; we had the answer for them.” And in normal circumstances, the middle managers know this, limiting their need for consideration to being elevated, as one large corporation middle manager expressed it, from “cc: status” to “to: status,” in the emails sent by executives. Leaving middle management out of the equation—that is, in cc: status—is a common mistake among would-be liberating leaders. But without their cooperation, changing a company’s culture is next to impossible.

Thanks to Tom’s question, the natural disregard of managers by top executives turned into consideration, opening the way for the former to join the campaign. More actions toward them would be taken in the following decade, but the basis for their involvement had been laid down.

Another group of key actors without whom no transformation would be possible were executives. So Teerlink began to involve them early on.

From the moment Teerlink was appointed president and CEO of Harley’s Motorcycle Division in 1986, he began sharing with two other executives—Tom “Shoot the Managers” Gelb, and John Campbell, vice president of human resources—his vision that Harley could “survive and prosper only if every employee took responsibility for leading the company.”11 After abandoning a gain-sharing plan for a full-blown transformation of Harley, they all agreed that the traditional “how” structures in Harley led people to avoid personal responsibility. The “not-my-job” syndrome caused employees to limit their ideas and initiatives, and to comply—even with nonsensical rules about “how” to do their jobs—instead of committing to act in the best interests of the company. As Jim Paterson—the fourth executive to join the group—summarized it, in a “how” company you “would end up with a lot of Indians who don’t know what to do without the chief.”12

Paterson himself offered one example of how Teerlink gradually pulled top executives into the transformation process. “In March of ‘88, Rich took me aside and said, ‘I want to name you president of the company,’” he recalled. “And a couple of weeks after that, he said, ‘Oh, by the way—we’re starting this Joint Vision Process, and you’ve gotta help make it work.’”13 Together, they revived Harley’s former practice of town hall-style meetings for all employees and conducted many of them, discussing and providing everyone with the information on operational and strategic issues. Then, after Paterson realized that a group of executives of the newly formed Operations Committee he presided over did not behave as role models for the unfolding transformation, he decided to involve them in the Joint Vision Process as well. Teerlink didn’t have to do it alone—he had executives who started to share the transformation leadership with him.

With the help of consultants, the executives were trained to change their bad habits, such as attributing intentions to people who aren’t present without first talking to them: “I believe Jane is against this proposal,” someone might say, having never spoken to Jane about it. In this way, an executive could use one absent manager’s imaginary objection to kill a proposal he didn’t like. They were also taught to avoid the common tactic of keeping silent about something during a meeting, only to raise objections later: “Hey, I said nothing in the meeting, but this whole thing won’t work in my place.” This is frequently used to avoid conflict, but in effect it sweeps real disagreements under the proverbial rug.

As executives and managers worked to change their own habits and lead the transformation, more and more people noticed that Harley’s existing “how” organizational structure got in its way by inhibiting people from having open relations and working well with one another. In 1991 things came to a head with a two-week strike at Harley’s plant in York, Pennsylvania—the same plant that,