The View from the Top: Managing Change in the Global Marketplace (video)

Key Features

20 part series in VHS or DVD-R video format

Prices include public performance rights.

Only available in the US and Canada.

Ten Executives Tell Hedrick Smith How They Are Leading Their Companies into the 21st Century

Global markets and powerful new competitors are rewriting the rules of business for American CEOs and their counterparts overseas. While many executives have failed to comprehend the changes taking place around them, a handful of corporate leaders are working profound and often surprising changes in their companies, rethinking old ways of doing business and retooling their organizations for the future. In a series of ten probing and remarkably candid conversations, award-winning journalist Hedrick Smith speaks with ten masters of change—executives who are transforming their companies and the industries they compete in—to learn how each was able to recognize the conditions that called for change and turn their organizations to face the challenge.

10-part series includes these titles:

• An Obsession with Quality
• Boeing Reinvents the Airplane
• A Banker’s Apprenticeship
• Power Sharing at Daimler-Benz
• Keiretsu and the Friday Lunch
• Turning Around General Motors
• Steering Ford to Superior Quality
• A CEO Goes Back to the Classroom
• Taking Risks at Intel
• Returning Strength to U.S. Steel

An Obsession with Quality

George Fisher, CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, Motorola 1990-1993

Named one of the most-admired executives in the electronics industry as president and CEO of Motorola, Kodak’s chief executive explains how Motorola’s single-minded pursuit of quality—not just product quality, but quality in how the company treats its people and customers—has helped the American electronics firm achieve nearly zero-defect production while assuming a position of world leadership in high-technology manufacturing. (35 minutes, color)

Boeing Reinvents the Airplane

Philip M. Condit, President, The Boeing Company

When their largest customers asked Boeing to match the innovations being offered by the European Airbus Consortium, Philip M. Condit went a step further. The Boeing 777 represented a fundamental rethinking of their product—and a revolution in the very way Boeing designed, tooled, and built airplanes. Philip Condit explains the new gospel of concurrent engineering at Boeing: "Teaming," an approach that integrates people and functions that once operated in isolation, one that has enabled Boeing to stay on top in one of the world’s most competitive industries. (37 minutes, color)

A Banker’s Apprenticeship

Hilmar Kopper, Chairman/Speaker, Deutsche Bank

The chairman of Germany’s largest bank never went to college, rising instead through the country’s legendary apprenticeship system, a combination of classroom and on-the-job training. In a wide-ranging and enlightening conversation, Hilmar Kopper describes how apprenticeship shapes German corporate philosophy and how German bankers are able to develop successfully a long-term outlook while other countries—including ours—often do little more than pay lip service to investing for the future. (54 minutes, color)

Power Sharing at Daimler-Benz

Edzard Reuter, Former Chairman, Daimler-Benz

In the U.S. it would be branded "communism," but at Daimler-Benz, union officials actually interview candidates for top corporate executive jobs. Edzard Reuter, former chairman of Germany’s largest corporation, explains what he believes are Germany’s principal competitive advantages over American companies, including a unique system of power sharing that enables owners, managers, and labor to sit together in a process that would be revolutionary in America. (36 minutes, color)

Keiretsu and the Friday Lunch

Minoru Makihara, President, Mitsubishi Corp.

Each Friday, executives, employees, shareholders, and strategic partners meet over lunch to map the long-term strategy for Mitsubishi. For Japan, competitiveness is the product of consensus. Minoru Makihara, whose selection as president of Mitsubishi in 1992 caused a stir in Tokyo because he had spent much of his career outside Japan (including earning an undergraduate degree at Harvard), has a unique vantage point from which to view the differences between Japanese and American management—and what the two can learn from one another. (36 minutes, color)

Turning Around General Motors

Harry J. Pearce, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, General Motors Corp.

In a stunningly candid interview, Harry Pearce describes the mistakes that led to General Motors’ huge loss of market share—the mismanagement of the board, the arrogance and isolation of top management—and shares GM’s strategy for reforming the world’s largest automaker and regaining world dominance in the automobile market. Back from the brink, here is how GM has made a new beginning with its customers and employees. (30 minutes, color)

Steering Ford to Superior Quality

Harold "Red" Poling, Former Chairman and CEO, Ford Motor Company

Under Red Poling’s leadership, Ford was the first U.S. automaker to recognize and respond to Japan’s invasion of the U.S. car market. "Quality Is Job One" became the rallying point around which managers, employees, suppliers, and dealers joined forces to build a better product, build it faster, and do it at a lower cost. Red Poling reveals the strategies he used to guarantee that quality became more than just a slogan at Ford. (34 minutes, color)

A CEO Goes Back to the Classroom

Features Robert W. Galvin, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board, Motorola

That education program helped earn Motorola the Baldrige Award—the Oscar for quality performance in the industrial world—a goal within the reach of any company recognizing it must compete one-on-one to survive.   One of the earliest advocates of continuing professional development and lifelong training, Motorola’s Bob Galvin explains how he instituted one of the most extensive and successful corporate employee education programs anywhere in the world. (34 minutes, color)

Taking Risks at Intel

Andrew S. Grove, CEO, Intel Corp.

Before "Intel Inside" became the sine qua non of PC manufacturing, Intel faced the prospect of being squeezed out of the microchip market by Japanese manufacturers who threatened to turn the chip into a commodity. Here, Andrew Grove explains how Intel shrugged off a business-as-usual mindset and began encouraging innovation and experimentation, enabling the company to climb back to the top of an industry where the core product is reinvented every six months. (32 minutes, color)

Returning Strength to U.S. Steel

Ten years ago, it took U.S. Steel 11 man-hours to ship a ton of steel. Today, the company makes and ships a ton in under three-and-a-half hours. Tom Usher recounts how one of America’s great business failures turned around by forging a partnership with its employees, shedding an overseer mentality, and building a lean, teamwork-oriented company whose productivity now competes toe-to-toe with its Japanese and German competitors. (34 minutes, color)