What about GM?

Toyota has a track record of taking over totally dysfunctional GM plants and making them functional by just changing management, with same unions, same facilities, same labor, same equipment. See history of NUMMI in Fremont, CA, going from GM's worst plant to the best in one year.

references:

Becoming Lean , Jeffrey Liker, page 62-63
http://books.google.com...

Stop Rising Healthcare Costs Using Toyota Lean Production Methods

By Robert Chalice (page 53)

http://books.google.com...

There may be no reason to lose the jobs, plants, or contracts.

Actually, what changed was not just management, but the whole underlying philosophy on which the plant was managed, which is the crucial change.

Chalice cites these factors as the new "five core values: teamwork, equity, involvement, mutual trust and respect, and safety."

In short, workers were treated as first class partners in the plant, not as some kind of "asset" to be "managed" and "controlled." They were listened to. They were respected.

Yes, that does make all the difference, in automobiles, as Liker points out, or in hospitals, as Chalice points out, supported by the Keystone study of John's Hopkins Dr. Peter Pronovost in Michigan, showing that when nurses were actually listened to by doctors, patients were significantly better off and had better outcomes.

Gasp. I took Dr. Pronovost's class in Patient Safety last year, and, yes, it really is that "simple." Culture drives safety and productivity. Culture drives the bottom line, not technology.

If you want things to work, you have to learn about human beings, and culture, and work within the constraints that puts on you. Humans are not machines and work way better than machines if allowed to (McGreggor's Theory Y), or way worse than machines if forced to (Theory X).

It's the job of the stockholders and stakeholders to realize that, and put management in place that will support the work force instead of trying to exploit it.

Period.

Toyota, Lean Thinking, Pull, and the role of Religion

Toyota is the envy of much of the world, particularly the area near the "Big-three" auto manufacturers in Detroit, Michigan, USA.

Two very popular studies of Toyota's "secret" is the book Lean Thinking, by James Womack and Daniel Jones, and The Machine that Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production
by the same authors. The Lean Institute says:

In this landmark study of the automobile industry, Jim Womack, Dan Jones, and Daniel Roos explain lean production to the world for the first time, and discuss its profound implications for society. It is based on the largest and most thorough study ever undertaken in any industry: the MIT five-million-dollar, five-year, fourteen-country International Motor Vehicle Program’s study of the worldwide auto industry.

Philip Caldwell, Chairman and CEO, Ford Motor Company (1980-1985) had this to say about "Machine"

Truly remarkable.... The most comprehensive, instructive, mind-stretching and provacative analysis of any major industry I have ever known. Why pay others huge consulting fees? Just read this book.

The cover of "lean thinking" cmments:

Instead of constantly reinventing business models, lean thinkers go back to basics by asking what the customer really perceives as value.

It goes on to talk about terms such as value stream, flow, cycle, perfection, and pull.

It is the concept "pull" that I want to focus on in this post.

Womack says this (Chapter 4, page 67 of the 2003 revised edition)

Pull in simplest terms mans that no one upstream should produce a good or service until the customer downstream asks for it, but actually following this rule in practice is a bit more complicated. The best way to understand the logic and challenge of pull thinking is to start with a real customer expressing a demand for a product and to work backwards through all the steps required to bring the desired product to the customer.

Now, the authors have way more industrial experience than I do, with a mere MBA and most of an MPH, and a single "lean workshop" under my belt -- but I have my model to bring to bear on this question and raise some new ways to view pull. So I will be undaunted and proceed to offer some suggestions and reinterpretations of the same data for the reader's consideration.

First, in light of a multi-level approach to everything, we should realize that "customer" is not only plural in a horizontal sense (many drivers of vehicles), but in a vertical sense (the dealers, the supply chain, the auto industry, society, etc.)

Second, in light of feedback's description of everything in terms of closed process loops, not open-ended chains, we should complete the loop from the customer back to the company and look at how many times that loop will be travelled. (This is the "multiplier" of any "small" improvement we can make in the loop process.)

Third, in light of the multiple-scale, multiple-lens approach, we should move back ten paces and zoom the lens down so we see far more of the picture in space and time, and realize that customers often are repeat customers, or even lifetime customers. In that sense, not only does the satisfaction of this car matter, but it matters many times over in terms of the next cars this person, and their friends and family will buy the rest of their lives, and their children, etc.

Also, as we view Toyota over time, we have to note that the Toyota miracle, and the Honda miracle, started small, at about zero, competing with a firmly entrenched US Auto industry. The approach used by Toyota was slow, patient, long-term focus combined with a focus on the needs of everyday people, poor people, people the workers could relate to, in a country demolished by World War II.

And, in context, we should realize that "product engineer" in Japan has the same cachet and social status as "aerospace engineer" or "rocket scientist" in the USA.

So, the context here is that the workers respected and cared about the customers, and the customers cared about and respected the workers.

Now, finally, we can look at "pull", not as a production scheduling technique with optimal mathematical qualities, but as a human caring mechanism that had the potential to shape, or drive the Toyota engine -- with money being second. The "work" had a role, in the minds of the workers, of connecting them to the customers, which was a desired state.

This is where the light of religion, we can speculate that two more effects come to play. One is illustrated by the motto of Boy's Town in the US:

He ain't heavy father, he's my brother!

The second is a story I've told before, probably made up but it touches a truth:

In the middle ages, a quality control specialist came to work on a production problem in a church being built. Some stonemasons were doing work that was not high quality and needed to be redone, and others were doing excellent work consistently. The specialist asked one of the poorer workers what he was doing, and the reply came "I'm building this wall." Then he asked one of the best workers what he was doing, and the reply came "I'm building a cathedral!"

What these stories suggest is that there is a driving force, and a shaping force, that dramatically alters the functioning of people - and it is related, surprise, to purpose and meaning of "the same" action. The quality and sustainability of a worker's efforts depends on what it is they believe they are doing, and what larger picture it fits into.

If this effect has a significant effect, it probably means that "the customer" isn't actually viewed as "a customer" by the worker, but is viewed instead as "a person." "If I do my job well, and everyone does their jobs well, then old Mr. Lee will be able to afford a car and visit his children and his ancestor's graveside!"

This kind of bouyancy can make heavy objects lighter, and "impossible tasks" suddenly possible. I'll relate this later to much research on the impact of such "psychology" on worker output, innovation, creativity, willingness to change or share, etc. It is more like lifting "heavy" objects in the water than in the air -- they have the same mass but much less weight. Being filled with this kind of "spirit" really does make a difference in hard-nose measured output.

Interesting. And kind of what religion has been urging us to do for centuries.

This view, or focus, or framework shifts what aspects of the "lean" technique are most important, and which aspects are just artifacts. It changes how the process looks and how it should be managed.

So, it should be evaluated to see if it holds up to a formal study.

I recall also one last item of interest. When the head of Toyota was first approached by Americans who wanted to learn about their production techniques, there was great concern by some that Toyota would lose its edge. He thought about this and finally said, basically "Let them come. The Americans will never be able to do this. They don't have the necessary spirit in dealing with each other."

We recall that W. Edwards Deming of Quality Control also had no luck getting his message heard by Americans, and finally went, by invitation, to Japan and gave all of Japan a 20 year lead on the US on such techniques. They weren't "secret" but they were "not hearable" by American management.

This factor needs to be considered as well, and the source of "resistance" to such ideas identified and rooted out, if this technique is to bloom and thrive here.

Powerpoint on why too much quality doesn't work

It seems to me that there can be such a thing as too many procedures, to the point where, as John Gall would say, the component that will fail is sthe one that you put in to make the system "fail-safe". That is, the thing that will kill you is the thing that you put in place to save you.

This may have been true of Comair Flight 5191, that crashed while attempting a mistaken takeoff from the wrong runway in Lexington, Kentucky last August.

Some pilots have wryly compared the pre-takeoff check list on a 727 to a "Michner novel", in terms of its length. In the case of Comair 5191, judging from the transcripts of the cockpit voice reocorder, the right-hand seat co-pilot apparently spent the entire taxi-time with head down, going though the checklist, while the left-hand seat pilot taxied the plane to the wrong runway, opened the throttles and told the copilot "you've got it."

We have some mixed signals on how to deal with this. In a perfect case, even a very "lightweight" solution is more than adequate. The picture illustrates a single sheet of typing paper rolled up and taped into that shape, holding up 3 books.

However, when it comes to checklists, or standard operating procedures (SOP's), sometimes there are simply too many. Cultures in the red-quadrant of the "competing values" diagram think that the problem is always too few procedures, and want to add more. They think the graph of reliability versus standardization goes up forever. In practice, the graph seems to be more hill-shaped, going up to a point, then somewhat down as more and more procedures start getting in the way, and finally result in catastrophic failure as the system crashes under the weight of it's own safety system. One can think, perhaps, of the "right number of laws" to have optimal regulation of an industry, and which of those two curves applies in whatever is your own case.

I put up a powerpoint slide presentation (no audio) considering this issue.
you can get it here, titled "spectacular.ppt".