Building Connected Ensembles, Rehearsing Creatively

While Willie G was helping to design the next generation of iconic motorcycles, he also got the opportunity of a lifetime. In 1981, Beals led a leveraged management buyout of the company from AMF with 12 other senior Harley executives, including Willie G Davidson. “I was almost totally broke,” said Willie G, “but I put all I had into the company. It was my life. There was no way I was going to be part of the shelving of Harley-Davidson. I had faith we could make it work.”⁶³

The deal was financed by Citicorp. Harley-Davidson was back in control of its own destiny.

Beals introduced ‘Just in Time’ production, known at Harley- Davidson as ‘Materials As Needed’, based on the Japanese model pioneered by Toyota. Many of the workforce were initially highly sceptical.

Beals involved the entire company in the switch, leading months of discussions at all levels and implementing the new process only when there was full consensus. For the new system to work successfully, employees would need to be fully involved in the planning and implementation.

The process gave workers a new sense of ownership. As Beals told Reid, “Normally, the engineers would figure out how to make the changes. They would have made them with the usual number of errors, and the reaction then would have been, ‘Those dummies screwed up again’. And worse yet, the employees wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help solve the problems.”

Now, he said, the general reaction was, “Well, we have some problems, but it’s a lot better than it was before, and we will get those problems fixed.”⁶⁴

Beals’ management buy-out and his painstaking involvement of the full workforce in his Materials As Needed strategy had built a new, genuine ensemble at Harley. People at all levels in the company were accepting ownership of every problem and, in another process of ‘creative rehearsal’, they were working together to find new solutions.