Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change pdfdrive com

parts manufacturer Delphi.
Miller’s approach has always revolved around fast questions, fast answers,
and decisive, often painful action. Time has never been on his side. Sprawled in
his office on Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, Miller told me that when
companies call, it’s usually because their situation has gone “from troubled to
desperate.”
When he takes on a challenge, he brings a fiercely competitive survivor’s
instinct and an outsider’s eye to the job. “I like to say I’m fearless and clueless.”
He starts by looking for the problem that was the core threat to the business. “I
do not regard myself as the answer man,” he says. “I am the question man …”
Typically, Miller spends the first few weeks meeting with people—
encouraging them to tell him what’s wrong, what doesn’t work, where the brick

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walls are getting in the way. After he asks about the past, he wants to know how
people see the future.
When did things start going wrong?
What have you learned?
How do you think we fix it?
He explained to me that his biggest professional challenge was as CEO of
Delphi, the auto-parts behemoth that had once been part of General Motors. The
Delphi Corporation was a $28 billion company, hemorrhaging money when
Miller took it over in 2005. Ultimately, Miller took the company through
Chapter 11
. At the time it was the biggest bankruptcy in the history of the
American auto industry. An ugly, nasty, and exceptionally painful process, at
times it seemed there was nothing but bad news.
Delphi had grown into the biggest auto-parts maker in the United States. By
the time Miller walked through the door, the company had diversified into too
many side ventures. It had lost focus on its core products even as global
competition got fierce. It was buckling under huge legacy costs of healthcare and
union pensions that it inherited when General Motors spun off the company six
years earlier. It was paying unionized workers up to $75 an hour in wages and
benefits. Workers could retire at age 48 and keep their healthcare for life.
Whenever the company closed a factory, it paid laid-off workers indefinitely
until they got another Delphi job, a policy that cost the company $400 million a
year.
Miller told the Wall Street Journal at the time that labor costs were “roughly
triple” what any other unionized American auto supplier had to pay. He wanted
to know:
What got us into the ditch?
What happened to the business plan?
Over dinner at the Frankfurt Auto Show, Miller recalled, he asked Delphi’s
international corporate customers to critique their experiences. It didn’t take
many rounds of schnapps for the horror stories to start flowing. They
complained that Delphi had become a plodding, distant, tangled, bureaucratic
nightmare of a company to work with. Getting a new braking system to
Mercedes-Benz, for example, required sign-off from multiple divisions in

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different countries. Decisions took forever. The supply chain was broken. It was
no way to run a competitive business. “It meant we were paralyzed,” Miller told
me.
In his book Miller compared himself to a surgeon and described Delphi as a
“desperate patient who waited too long to seek treatment.” He concluded that
major surgery was required. Five months after his arrival, Delphi filed for
bankruptcy and began its painful reorganization. Miller closed twenty-one of
twenty-nine factories, putting four out of ten workers out of their jobs. He forced
major wage concessions on the United Auto Workers (UAW) and unloaded most
of its legacy costs in worker healthcare and pensions. He moved the company
away from manufacturing old-style, low-profit parts—chassis, brakes, hoses—
and into high-tech electronics, navigation, and fuel systems.
Miller fumbled some public statements, making a difficult task even harder.
He complained that Delphi couldn’t afford to pay union workers $65 an hour
and fund healthcare and other expensive benefits even as the company approved
big bonuses for top executives. Hourly workers erupted. Miller faced protests
and court challenges. As penance and a PR move, he cut his salary from $1.5
million to just $1. Still, when he looked out his window one day, he saw union
protesters carrying signs that said, “Miller Isn’t Worth a Buck.”
But as a result of asking his “bad news” questions, Miller knew the situation
was dire. He also knew the crisis extended beyond Delphi. General Motors and
other companies depended on Delphi auto parts. If Delphi went under, it could
take automakers down with it.
“My goal was to do minimal harm to the world’s auto industry,” he said.
“Yes, we had come out of GM, but we sold parts to every automaker on the
planet, without which no automaker could do much.”
At tremendous cost to workers and his own public profile, Miller salvaged
the company. The concessions he forced and the ripple effect it had through the
industry prompted business writer Allan Sloane to give Miller credit for saving
“what’s left of the Detroit Three automakers.”