total rewards

The article I chose is titled “How BMW successfully practices sustainable leadership principles”, and is nested in many of the concepts covered during the period of this course. The main premise focuses on how the BMW Corporation was able to build and incorporate a resilient leadership model that helped shape how the company most recently survived the economic downturn that started in 2008. The authors have developed a model called “honeybee” leadership that spreads 23 key principles built into a 4-tier pyramid. The base of the pyramid is comprised of 14 foundation practices; the second tier contains 6 higher-level practices that are a result of any combination of the foundational practices being applied; the third tier has 3 performance outcomes. When the company works toward problem solving, any outcome can be arrived at by applying the principles in combinations that help focus efforts and priorities of work. In the context of this article, focusing on these key principles allowed the company to post record profits in 2010 (the highest it has seen since the company was founded in 1916), while 2 main competitors-GM and Chrysler-fell into bankruptcy due to unsustainable business practices.
To start, BMW only builds cars that have been ordered. This allows the company to flex its work force based on demand, and ultimately allowed the company to create 300 work-time patterns that offered flexibility for the workers as they saw fit. Additionally, as the world economy soured, the company was forced to cut overhead costs and reduce staffing but did so in a creative way; they offered early retirement packages, did not renew contracts with temporary workers and did not backfill vacant position positions. However, the company values its highly-skilled workforce, and in order to keep those individuals employed, they forged a collaboration with the German government that allowed the company to shift workers to a 4-day work week which BMW paid, while the German