Bryce Currie is Ford's Chief Manufacturing Officer, responsible for over 40 plants worldwide and well over 100,000 people. He and Jan Griffiths started their careers in the same command-and-control world, where books got thrown in meetings, and nobody offered a second idea because nobody was listening. Bryce chose a different path, and he has spent 51 weeks of his life on a bus proving it works.
Those bus tours are the heart of this conversation. Four plants in a week, 50 people from every level and function, 5:30 in the morning until 10:30 at night. Bryce also gets specific about the parts most leaders skip: shutting his phone off so his team learns to run without him, chasing two ideas from every operator, and using Thomas Edison's 2,332 inventions as the bar for what his people can create in a single year.
This one is about moving a 100-year-old company at speed, and why culture is not soft; it is the operating system that delivers the results.
Episode Highlights:
00:00 Intro
02:47 Who Are You as a Leader?
03:48 Unlearning Command and Control
04:59 Fear Culture That Died
07:53 From a Relay Race to a Basketball Court
08:21 Inside the Bus Tour
13:11 Why He Shuts His Phone Off
16:02 Empowerment or Micromanagement
18:02 The Pushback and the Right Talent
26:03 Thomas Edison and the 2,332 Challenge
31:08 Culture Is Not Soft
#AutomotiveLeadership #ServantLeadership #Manufacturing
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The Automotive Leaders Podcast is hosted by Jan Griffiths, the champion for culture change in the automotive industry. From a farm in Wales to the C-suite of a $3 billion Tier-1 supplier, Jan built her career inside this industry. Now she's out to transform it.
Her argument is blunt. The pressure on this industry isn't letting up. The survivors will be the ones who reinvent how they work. Speed wins. Everyone else gets left behind.
Every episode, Jan sits down with the leaders driving that change. Real conversations about tariffs, supply chain shocks, EV uncertainty, AI, and the shift from command-and-control to authentic, human-centered leadership.
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