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      Your dream is only as good as the people who believe in it. If you want to create change, then you cannot do it alone, or against the will of the people who work with you. But creating shared belief is never straightforward, especially if some of the team members you are asking to change like the status quo.

      In this chapter, we will look at what happened in the job I did immediately after Porsche, when I moved to the position of CEO of BMW GB, and discovered that success can be as big an impediment to culture change as failure.

      Finding a sense of shared purpose in a business that previously had treated strategy as a sort of optional extra helped to create growth that was far in excess of what anyone expected.

      Rejecting the Status Quo

      In 1994, the British car manufacturer Rover Group plc was acquired by BMW, the German luxury car manufacturer, in a negotiation that took only 10 days. BMW paid £800 million for a manufacturer that it hoped would create economies of scale, as it became involved in mass manufacturing. BMW considered that, until it sold 1 million cars a year, it could be vulnerable in the future. I had always admired BMW's engineering and business, and I thought of Tom Purves, who had risen from an apprenticeship at Rolls Royce to run BMW's business in the UK, as a mentor.

      Tom was an experienced, skilled leader who had overseen BMW GB's steady growth. He had been assigned to Rover to represent BMW's interests, and one day in 1996 he visited my office at Porsche for lunch.

      “One of my responsibilities is to find my successor,” he said, “I think you'd be very good at it.”

      A few weeks later, I was visiting BMW's high-rise headquarters in Munich. I did six interviews in a day, and every time I got in the lift it went up, so I thought, “As long as this keeps going up I'm doing all right.” Eventually the lift went all the way to the top: the last interview of the day was in the office of Bernd Pischetsrieder, BMW's chairman. His office was a curved room and so large that, at first, I only realized he was there from the clouds of cigar smoke that snaked round the corner.

      We shook hands. “Welcome to BMW,” he said.

      At that point, no one had yet asked me what I intended to do. Looking back, they assumed that I would do what they wanted me to do. After all, when you join, you know nothing. But, if you dream, you can't stop yourself from breaking the rules.