There are a lot of lessons to be learned in life and one that many great leaders live by is never, ever dismiss another person’s ‘great idea’.
Picture this: it’s the late 1970s, you’re the boss of BMW Motorrad and times are tough in the business of being a British or European motorcycle manufacturer. The Japanese brands have hit the market with all guns blazing and your market share, and as a consequence your company profits, are plunging.
This was precisely the time when Karl Heinz Gerlinger was made deputy director of BMW Motorrad and given an ultimatum: make the motorcycle division profitable or close it down.
BMW needed to reinvent itself in the marketplace and Gerlinger knew he needed a check-mate move in the game of chess known as motorcycle marketing. Which is when BMW engineer and test rider Laszlo Peres unveiled a prototype BMW he had built that took BMW’s much-loved boxer twin-cylinder engine, mated it with a more off-road-ready chassis than anything in BMW’s line-up and called it an Enduro. It was obviously heavier than the single-cylinder Japanese trail bikes of the day, but the bike struck a chord with Gerlinger and BMW’s brass as a machine that could comfortably handle both on-and off-road
