THE CURE FOR EXHAUSTION
Sometimes, exhausted
with toil and endeavour,
I wish I could sleep
for ever and ever;
but then this reflection
my longing allays:
I shall be doing it
one of these days.
- Piet Hein
It was a tense moment for me in the color-and-materials studio of BMW. A senior manager in the finance department was grilling me: why, he wanted to know, did my team insist on using costly materials that the customer would never see? Didn't I know that people buy our cars for their looks and their fine engines? Just at that moment, a visibly distressed senior designer walked up to us, carrying a preproduction middle console from one of our new sedans. Disregarding the finance manager, she opened the console lid, reached her fingers into a dark pocket deep inside, and asked me to do likewise."Feel this," she said."The supplier is having a terrible time getting the texture right in here. The surface is not good, Herr Bangle." As she waited for my response, the finance manager watched me intently.
That moment crystallizes the persistent, inevitable conflict between corporate pragmatism and artistic passion that I manage at BMW. The designer was right - the texture inside the pocket didn't meet BMW's exacting design standards. And yet the finance manager was also right; would customers know the difference? His job was to put the brakes on costly, seemingly insignificant design details. We are a business after all.
My job as director of design, overseeing 220 artists at BMW, is to mediate between the corporate and artistic mind-sets within the company. What I do is not unique to BMW. Plenty of companies face the challenge of balancing art with commerce: movie studios, fashion design firms, and luxury goods manufacturers struggle with the same thing. But BMW is an example of the intersection of commerce and art writ large. Our fanaticism about design excellence is matched only by the company's driving desire to remain profitable. And those objectives have required me to develop a unique set of operating principles.
Three principles in particular have stood me in good stead. First, protect the creative team - that is, shield them from the unproductive commentary of others in the company. This is necessary because artists intrigue other people as much as they confound them. Everyone at BMW wants to know what the designers in my group are up to, but that interest very rarely gets communicated to the designers in a constructive way.
Second, safeguard the artistic process. By this, I mean that my managers and I have to construct a barrier around model development so that time-to-market pressures don't disrupt or harm the actual work. Over the years I have found that safeguarding the process takes a lot of effort, but it is necessary because it guarantees that BMW's design is never compromised. And that design is what makes both our artists - and our customers - intensely loyal.
Third, be an inventive communicator. In any organization dependent on art and commerce finding common ground, managers must have unusual powers of persuasion. Unless they do, they can never be good mediators - and mediation is what managing at the intersection of art and commerce is all about.
The Soul of the Machine
Before I explore these principles further, some background is in order. I'm an American-born car designer who learned my craft from great European masters. I joined BMW as design director in October 1992 after spending several years in the design studios of Opel and Fiat. The studio where I work is part of BMW's sprawling, 140,000-square foot research and development campus in Munich. During my tenure, this design group, along with BMW's daughter company, Designworks USA, has produced exterior and interior designs for BMW's current 3 Series family of cars. The group designed the 5 Series Touring, Z3 M-Coupe, X5, and Z8, as well as the M cars, concept car Z9 models, and BMW's motorcycles. BMW's Mini car was born here, not to mention designs for dozens of other products, such as watches, sunglasses, bicycles, luggage, and clothing.
From the moment I arrived in Munich, I understood the company's core value: to be an engineering-driven company whose cars and motorcycles are born from passion. We don't make "automobiles," which are utilitarian machines you use to get from point A to point B. We make "cars," moving works of art that express the driver's love of quality. This may sound like New Age hokum, but it is a powerful core belief at BMW. Because we believe it, we insist on design honesty. We're convinced that if we mislead our customers by using walnut-colored plastic on the dashboard instead of real wood, those customers will wonder how else we're snookering them. So we use expensive, difficult-to-mold, real wood veneers. BMW has one of the most successful business models in the manufacturing world precisely because many people are eager to pay a small fortune to experience a car as we define it.
...
A Priceless Process
I also have to protect the process itself, which is subtly different from protecting the designers. While the designers are still asking themselves, "Should this dashboard be made of walnut or cherry?" the engineers and planners are clamoring for decimal points and detailed specs. A big part of my job is to make sure that we don't shift the focus from design to engineering too soon. In my quest to convince nondesigners that a BMW, like a fine wine, cannot be hurried, I often appeal to a deeply held, almost nonverbal sense about BMW-ness - a certain pride of product shared by everyone in the company that expresses itself in the classic quality of our cars, from the purring engines to the buttery seats. Every employee here knows that if a car doesn't have these things, it's simply not a BMW - and customers won't buy it.
I use this cultural value to keep others from trying to overindustrialize our design methods. I spend a lot of time educating nondesigners about the design process, which consists of three fundamental steps: understanding (arriving at the final choice by involving upper management in the process); believing (perfecting the design); and seeing (focusing on details from the customer's point of view and correcting impurities in the final design phases).
...
Working groups within large companies often misunderstand one another, but they also have every reason to collaborate. I'm a big fan of metaphors, even blunt ones. I like to tell my design team that they, the engineers, and the business managers are like three meshed gears. If the gears are separated and spinning solo, nothing happens. If the gears turn the same way, they freeze up. They have to be interconnected and turning in opposite directions. But as we rotate, we transfer power to one another. If I've learned anything from standing at the precarious intersection of art and commerce, it's that communication is the grease that keeps the gears engaged and running smoothly. All my protection and persuasion tactics are in the service of the car that will be created and built, bought and loved. If I do my job well, the gears will engage for the good of that car, and things will begin to move.
Art and commerce will never be on the same side of the street, but they can be on the same journey - with some help from folks like me. The story at the beginning of this article explains why. As the finance manager in the color-and-materials studio scowled at me and at the designer holding the console, I talked to him. I used a simple metaphor to bring him back to the BMW-ness that we all hold dear. I pointed to one of the color boards that pictured a beautiful, ancient Gothic cathedral in Munich. "Those cherubs cost a lot to put on the church," I said. "But can you imagine the cathedral without its cherubs?" When he shook his head, I continued, "Funny thing about Gothic churches. You get cherubs regardless of whether you look at them or not. Making cherubs is how the craftsmen of the time honored their religion. So is your problem with the cherubs or with the church?" Then I handed him the console, and told him to poke his fingers inside the dark pocket. As he did so, his eyes glimmered with sudden comprehension.
- Chris Bangle, The Ultimate Creativity Machine: How BMW Turns Art into Profit
