Making Sense of Organizations
Sit no longer at your dusty window I urge you to break the gaze from your oh so cherished glass
—Gian Torrano Jacobs Journeys through the Windows of Perception
Reprinted by permission of the poet, Gian Torrano Jacobs.
Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, Sixth Edition. Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal. ! 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by Jossey-Bass.
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1 c h a p t e r
Introduction The Power of Reframing
By the second decade of the twenty-!rst century, the German carmaker Volkswagen and the U.S. bank Wells Fargo were among the world’s
largest, most successful, and most admired !rms. Then both trashed their own brand by following the same script. It’s a drama in three acts:
Act I: Set daunting standards for employees to improve performance.
Act II: Look the other way when employees cheat because they think it’s the only way to meet the targets.
Act III:When the cheating leads to amedia!restormandpublic outrage, blame the workers and paint top managers as blameless.
In Wells Fargo’s case, the bank !red more than 5,000 lower-level employees but offered an exit bonus of $125 million to the executive who oversaw them (Sorkin, 2016).
Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn was known as an eagle-eyed micromanager but pleaded ignorance when his company admitted in 2015 that it had been cheating for years on emissions tests of its “clean” diesels. He was quickly replaced by Matthias Müller, who claimed that he didn’t know anything about VW’s cheating either. Müller also explained why VW wasn’t exactly guilty: “It was a technical problem. We had not
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Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, Sixth Edition. Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal. ! 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by Jossey-Bass.
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the interpretation of the American law . . . We didn’t lie. We didn’t understand the question !rst” (Smith and Parloff, 2016). Apparently VW was smart enough to design clever software to fudge emissions tests but not smart enough to know that cheating might be illegal.
The smokescreen worked for years—VW sold a lot of diesels to consumers who wanted just what Volkswagen claimed to offer, a car at the sweet spot of low emissions, high performance, and great fuel economy. The cheating apparently began around 2008, seven years before it became public, when Volkswagen engineers realized they could not make good on the company’s public, clean-diesel promises (Ewing, 2015). Bob Lutz, an industry insider, described VW’s management system as “a reign of terror and a culture where performance was driven by fear and intimidation” (Lutz, 2015). VW engineers faced a tough choice. Should they tell the truth and lose their jobs now or cheat and maybe lose their jobs later? The engineers chose option B. The story did not end happily. In January, 2017, VW pleaded guilty to cheating on emissions tests and agreed to pay a !ne of $4.3 billion. In the same week, six VW executives were indicted for conspiring to defraud the United States.1 In Spring of 2017, VW’s legal troubles appeared to be winding down in the United States, at a total cost of more than $20 billion, but were still ramping up in Germany, where authorities had launched criminal investigations (Ewing, 2017).
