Nobody Washes a Rented Car

I rent a lot of cars. I travel to customers constantly, mostly diagnostic manufacturers across Europe and the US, which means a steady rotation of airport rental counters and cars I will drive for two days and never see again.

I have never once washed one. It has never even occurred to me. I return them with coffee cups in the door and mud on the mats, and I do not feel a thing about it. Neither do you. Nobody washes a rented car.

Now think about your own car. Or the first car you actually owned. When I was nineteen, I had a very old Volvo that burned so much oil it left a blue cloud behind it, and I rebuilt the whole engine myself, outside, in a parking lot, over two days I mostly did not sleep through. Nobody asked me to. There was no inspection waiting at the end, no incentive, no checklist. I did it because the car was mine, and you take care of what is yours. That is the entire principle, and it is one of the most underused ideas in management.

I first saw it properly named in a book by Bill Creech, the four-star general who ran the US Tactical Air Command as it collapsed, and who later wrote The Five Pillars of TQM. Creech inherited a force where half the aircraft were not combat-ready, and the people were leaving in droves, and he turned it around with no extra money, no extra planes, and no extra people. The mechanism he used was ownership. He broke the giant centralized machine into small teams, gave each team a real product they owned from start to finish, and let them feel the result. He even gave teams days off for beating their goals. The experts of his day called it wasteful. He insisted that pride creates performance, and he was right. People who own the outcome take care of it. People who do not, do not. He just built the structure that made ownership possible.

Here is what most managers do instead, and I have done some of it myself before I knew better.

When the work is not good enough, we reach for inspection. We add a quality management system. We add audits. We add checklists, sign-offs, and review gates. We add metrics and dashboards so we can see the problem coming. All of this is a way of trying to force care into a process from the outside. And it does not work because no amount of inspection can make a person love something that is not theirs. You can audit a rented car every time it comes back. You will never make the driver wash it.

This is the part that took me years to understand. Quality is not a standard you bolt on at the end. It is a by-product of ownership.

When someone genuinely owns their work, you barely need to inspect it because they would not let it leave their hands in bad shape. When nobody owns it, no inspection regime in the world is dense enough to catch everything, and the things it misses are exactly the things that hurt you later, in a customer's hands, in a clinical result, on a factory floor at two in the morning.

When I took over Ginolis, I found a culture I recognized immediately. Things were getting shipped, and the quiet hope was that the customer would not notice. That is the signature of an organization where nobody owns the work. Everyone is renting. The instinct in that situation is to clamp down with more control. I went the other way. We rebuilt the work so that small teams owned a product end-to-end and could see what they had made. Today, nothing leaves the door unless it is fully tested and the team is proud of it. That sentence is not a slogan we put on a wall. It describes who is responsible.

Pride is doing the work that supervision used to do badly. And this applies all the way up, including me. A leader who owns nothing is driving a rental, too. The CEO who only reads the report on the work, cannot prepare the quotation, cannot use the ERP, has never stood on the floor when the line is down, is not running the company. They will manage it the way you treat a rental: keep it running, hand it back, feel nothing. I have always believed that a CEO who cannot do the work cannot lead the people who do it. The ownership principle is the deeper reason why. You cannot ask people to treat the work as theirs while you treat it as something you are passing through.

So the practical question is almost never the one managers ask. They ask: How do I get my people to care more, be more accountable, and take more responsibility? That question has no answer because care is not something you can demand, buy, or schedule. The real question is structural. What have I actually given this person that is theirs? Can they see the result of their own work, or does it disappear into a process where their part is invisible? Does the thing they produce bear their name in a way that matters, or could it be anyone's?

If the answer is that nobody can point to a piece of the work and say that is mine, I made that, and it is good, then you do not have an accountability problem. You have an ownership problem, and you built it yourself when you organized the work.

You cannot wash ownership into existence after the fact. You cannot audit it in, incentivize it in, or insist on it. You can only hand someone something that is genuinely theirs, make the result visible to them, and then get out of the way.

Do that, and you will never have to tell anyone to wash the car.

Kauko Väinämö is CEO of Ginolis