Putting on the Brakes: The Value of Parochialism

The experience of a major European car manufacturer provides a case study of the benefits to be gained from leaders who tenaciously represent their domains, despite the pressure to take a holistic view. I have masked certain technical details along with the identity of the company in order to tell this story, but it's a compelling example of the virtues of parochialism, of taking the narrow view—the prerequisite for managing dependencies.

By 2000, this company, like most automakers, had been building computing systems into its cars for more than a decade, following GM's lead in the late 1980s. As the company looked forward to its next-generation vehicle, the leader of its Engineering Group, with the backing of the general managers, decided to pursue an aggressive new design philosophy in the redesign of the next-generation platform. The then current model had seventeen major microprocessors distributed throughout the car, each of which controlled a separate subsystem such as brakes, engine, audio, HVAC, and so on. Future designs would combine these into three central processors, with each of the three controlling multiple systems and providing redundancy in case any of them....