What Fisker’s Bankruptcy Teaches About Leadership and Collaboration
In 2012, Henrik Fisker had a vision. He was one of the most respected automotive designers alive. His fingerprints were on the BMW Z8, the Aston Martin DB9. He understood what cars could look like when someone cared enough to get it right. And in 2012, he finally decided to build one of his own.
The Fisker Ocean was going to be different. A fully electric SUV that didn’t look like an appliance. It was to have sleek lines, a solar roof panel, and a starting price that positioned it squarely against Tesla. By 2022, the Ocean had generated 31,000 reservations representing nearly $1.7 billion in potential revenue. Industry analysts were paying attention. Investors were in.
It looked, from the outside, like the beginning of something big; but it wasn’t. Fisker Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2024. They had produced just 11,000 vehicles. The company carried more than $1 billion in debt. And when the doors closed, every one of those 11,000 Ocean owners, people who had paid between $40,000 and $70,000 for their cars found themselves with an electric car that was no longer supported.
To be clear, these weren’t just orphaned customers; they were owners of vehicles that had been built to depend on Fisker’s servers to function. That’s right, everything from brakes, airbags, battery management, door locks, and virtually every subsystem in the Ocean periodically needed to connect with Fisker’s cloud infrastructure. When the company died, those servers went dark. And the cars began losing the functionality people had paid for.
The Rise of the Fisker Owners Association: A Community-Led Innovation
But, here is where the story stops being about a car company. Within months of the bankruptcy, something formed that no one at Fisker had designed, no board had approved, and no HR team had staffed. A group of Fisker customers from around the world created the Fisker Owners Association, or the FOA. The group grew to 4,000 members, and what those 4,000 people did next is what this episode is actually about.
The FOA reverse-engineered Fisker’s proprietary software. They mapped what is called the CAN bus networks that ran every subsystem in the car. They built open-source tools on GitHub. Engineers who knew how to hack the system taught people who had never heard the term CAN bus before they bought an EV. In Europe, a group of technically skilled members who called themselves the Flying Doctors, started traveling to other owners’ locations to keep their cars running.
I really want you to think about this for a moment. Nobody mandated this, nobody put it in a job descriptio, and nobody issued a memo from the C-suite. The FOA and the Flying Doctors did it because they believed the thing was worth saving. That distinction between compliance and belief is this entire episode.
Why Corporate Collaboration Mandates Often Fail
Let me tell you what collaboration without a mandate looks like, because most organizations have never seen it. Every week, in firms and companies and law practices across this country, leaders are issuing some version of the same directive. It sounds something like this: “collaborate more”, “share information across teams”, “cross-sell”, “integrate practices”, “we are one firm”, and “we win together”. It shows up in all-hands meetings, partner retreats, and performance review criteria. It shows up on values posters in conference rooms and break rooms that nobody reads after the first week.
The problem? It rarely works. Not at the level it needs to.
You know why? Because a mandate addresses behavior … and it doesn’t touch belief.
The person who is hoarding their client relationships, protecting their research, keeping their presentation deck locked down are not failing to follow a policy, but rather they are operating from a perfectly rational belief that their individual value depends on what only they know. Their identity has a hard edge, it stops at the boundary of their own contribution, and anything beyond that edge feels like a threat.
In Episode 64, I discussed the ego inversion that happens when “my client, my files, my research” becomes a survival strategy. If you haven’t heard that one, go back because it maps directly to what we’re talking about here.
The FOA engineers had none of that because there was no territory to protect, no client relationship to hoard, and no promotion on the line for being the only one who understood the firmware. So the knowledge moved, freely, rapidly, and across 4,000 people who had never met each other, organized in no formal hierarchy. Yet, they were working across time zones and languages, toward a goal no executive had set for them.
What made the FOA possible was belief. They believed the car was worth saving. They believed the community was worth building. And somewhere in that belief, individual self-interest stopped being the operating logic.
I want to be careful here, because I’m not suggest that this was altruism as that lets leaders off the hook. What happened in the FOA is not evidence that people are selfless when they’re sufficiently inspired. Rather, I believe that it’s evidence that belief expands the definition of self. When you believe in something deeply enough, the thing you believe in becomes part of who you are. It logically follows then that protecting that believe and yourself become the same calculation.
Culture-Driven Collaboration: 3 Powerful Real-World Examples
I’ve talked on this show about three moments that shaped how I think about this, and I’ll name them briefly, because they each carry a piece of the argument.
If you heard Episode 64, you know the shoe-shine chair story. A co-founder of a company, not a junior employee, a co-founder, got down and polished a sales rep’s shoes because the rep thought he was too important to pick up office supplies. The co-founder’s identity was fully embedded in the mission. No task was beneath that.
I’ve also talked about the service desk technician who worked for me and believed that every ticket he closed was one step closer to finding a cure for brain cancer, because the research company work depended on the systems he kept running. He did not have a corner office; but he had a belief that made the gap between his daily work and its ultimate purpose disappear.
And then there’s the Raving Fans standard that was embedded in me by another company I worked for. That wasn’t a service policy, but it was a conviction that ordinary was a choice, and everyone on that team had decided not to make that choice. We all believed in the company’s mission. We strongly believed in the culture we were building. We believed we were different and together we’d be the most successful company in our industry - and it worked.
The service desk tech wasn’t collaborating because someone told him to. The co-founder wasn’t polishing shoes because it was in his job description. The Raving Fans culture didn’t spread through a mandate. It spread because people believed in what they were part of and that belief made the standard obvious.
The FOA engineers who taught CAN bus hacking to strangers were in the same place. Their self-interest had expanded to include the community. Sharing what they knew wasn’t a sacrifice. It was the most logical thing they could do.
Leadership Reflection: Motivating Teams by Belief versus Compliance
So here is the question I am posing to all of you.
If the collaboration mandate stopped tomorrow; if no one was reviewing people’s performance on collaboration, if the values poster came off the wall, if the all-hands meeting ended and was never rescheduled, would the behavior continue?
If the answer is yes, you have belief.
If the answer is no, you have compliance. And compliance is fragile in ways that belief is not.
Fisker had 11,000 customers who believed in the product they had purchased. The company never built that belief deliberately. It arrived because of what the car represented - a different kind of future. When the institution died, the belief didn’t. It had nowhere to go but into the people who held it.
I do not believe that most leaders ever see this, because most leaders don’t think about belief as something they’re actively building or failing to build. They think about strategy, incentive structures, and performance management.
Ask yourself honestly:
What do the people around you believe about the work they’re doing?
Do they believe it matters beyond their own compensation?
Do they believe the team’s success is their success?
Do they believe in a standard of service or output that they would hold themselves to even if no one was watching?
If you don’t know the answer, that tells you something.
If you know the answer is no, that tells you something more important.
Building Contagious Organizational Belief That Outlasts the Institution
I keep coming back to a question that sits at the center of the leadership book I’m writing: How do you build belief that’s contagious enough to survive the institution?
The FOA proved it’s possible. My VP of Sales at a company I once worked for, and whose story is the centerpiece of a chapter in the book, proved it on purpose. The belief he built in the people around him survived the organization that eventually removed him. It lives in the way those people lead today; including myself.
That’s what the book is built to answer. Not how do you build a great organization. How do you build belief that outlasts you. Those are very different questions. And the Fisker story, as strange as it is, points directly at the second one.
5 Key Takeaways on Creating a Collaborative, Belief-Driven Culture
Collaboration doesn’t happen because you tell people to collaborate. It happens when people believe the mission is worth more than their individual territory. The mandate is what you reach for when the belief isn’t there.
Belief expands the definition of self. When someone is genuinely invested in what they’re building, sharing knowledge and capability isn’t a sacrifice. It becomes the obvious move. The FOA engineers taught strangers to hack CAN buses because the community had become part of who they were.
The question to ask about your organization is not “are people collaborating?” The question is “would they collaborate if no one was asking them to?” The gap between those two answers is where your actual culture lives.
Fisker built a product that required the institution to survive in order for the customer to receive the value they purchased. Most leaders build teams the same way — everything routes through one person, one node, one relationship. When that node goes dark, the car won’t start. Build belief that can run without you.
Contagious belief is not accidental. It is the result of leaders who visibly model what it looks like to subordinate their individual identity to the mission — consistently, publicly, and at personal cost. The shoes get polished because the co-founder means it, not because the policy requires it.
How to Build a Team Worth Following
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