From a piece on Ford’s CEO:
Mulally instituted color coding for reports: green for good, yellow for caution, red for problems.
Managers coded their operations green at the first couple of meetings to show how well they were doing, but Mulally called them on it. “You guys, you know we lost a few billion dollars last year,” he told the group. “Is there anything that’s not going well?”
After that the process loosened up. Americas boss Mark Fields went first. He admitted that the Ford Edge, due to arrive at dealers, had some technical problems with the rear lift gate and wasn’t ready for the start of production.
“The whole place was deathly silent,” says Mulally. “Then I clapped, and I said, ‘Mark, I really appreciate that clear visibility.’ And the next week the entire set of charts were all rainbows.”
“If something is off-track, we are much better at identifying it and resolving it,” says CFO Booth. “Not everything turns to green. If it doesn’t, we have to modify the plan.”
Compare that to the prevalent culture in other companies, where bad news or even (God forbid!) talking about the competition is strongly frowned upon.