I have just started reading ?Driven ? Inside BMW, the most admired car company in the world? by David Kiley

It promises to be interesting and I hope to be writing more about it.

I asked Panke, (BMW?s chairman Dr. Hemut Panke) who was a consultant at Mckinsey and Co. before joining BMW in 1982, what he would tell companies seeking insight from BMW if he were still charging McKinsey big bucks for his advice. Said Panke, “I would say: Focus on understanding who you are, what you stand for. What are the values you have in the organization? What are the values you believe in for the products and services you sell and provide? People like to play charades when they are children. But in real life you cannot impersonate other values and characters and basic principles. There is a sentence I often use to crystallize what we are about. And I think it?s important to be able to do that: to articulate the one idea in one sentence that captures the company?s character so that every one understands and believes it. ‘BMW builds high performance products because BMW is a high performance organization.? It is across seemingly unrelated fields and organizations within the company. Striving for better performance than our competitors is something that drives our controllers and our human resources people, not just our designers and engineers.”

• Deepa