KNOW WHO YOU ARE!

 David Kiley, Driven: Inside BMW, the Most Admired Car Company in the World (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004) ("It wasn't until July 2002 interview with BMW chairman Dr. Helmut Panke that I realized the secret of BMW's success corresponded with some of the best advice I ever received from my own parents. [] 'Remember who you are.' [] I asked Panke, who was a consultant at McKinsey & Co. before joining BMW in 1982, what he would tell companies seeking insights 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 that 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 everyone understands and believes it. "BMW builds high-performance products because BMW is a high-performance organization." This is an idea that speaks not just to our products. 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." Id. at 3-4.).