Have you ever heard This American Life? It’s a weekly radio broadcast on most National Public Radio (NPR) stations that focuses on some odd, unusual or misunderstood aspect of American life. It’s an amazing program, and while the title certainly indicates an American focus, the program has broad international and cultural perspective. (Their program a few years ago all about China was a cultural master class!)
Well, last week’s episode was another piece of radio excellence and one of the best stories of cross-cultural education and miseducation that I’ve ever heard. It tells the story of General Motors and Toyota, and the partnership they formed in the late 1980’s around the NUMMI auto assembly plant in Freemont, California.
In short, the story goes something like this: In the decade from 1974 to 1984, GM’s market share plummeted from 47% to 34%. GM knew they were in trouble, and nothing represented GM’s slide into mediocrity like its assembly plant in Freemont, California. It was GM’s worst producing plant in the country in every way! Management and the union hated each other.
Rather than shut the facility down, GM struck a deal with Toyota to reorganize the Freemont plant along Toyota’s then revolutionary management and production system, The Toyota Way, which emphasized teamwork and harmony between workers and management, placed quality over quantity, constantly eliminated waste (muda), and the now well known principle of kaizen—striving for continuous improvement.
Over the course of a year, GM sent nearly every worker at the Freemont plant over to Japan for two weeks of training. And to management’s amazement, the plan worked. In less than a year the Freemont plant went from one of the worst in the country to the very best in terms of quality, efficiency and employee satisfaction. The radio piece touches on several instances where cynical, longtime employees were entirely reinvigorated by the new management and production system—touching stuff!
Now, what’s interesting here, and the following decades of GM’s decline up until their 2010 bankruptcy and bailout bares out, is that when GM tried to overhaul their entire management and production philosophy to one that mirrored the Toyota Way and the success of the Freemont plant, it failed miserably. Of course, things like ego, arrogance, small mindedness and territorialism got in the way, but all that existed at the Freemont plant in spades.
All of this got me to thinking, why was GM unable to mimic the cultural shift that worked so well at the Freemont plant? Here’s the insight I had: Cultural transformation, be it of a personal or corporate nature, necessitates cultural emersion. When GM sought to revitalize the Freemont plant it sent every single worker over to Japan where they spent two weeks learning the Toyota Way. Each worker had a direct and emotional response to a then revolutionary concept in worker-management relations and production style, and it affected them deeply.
When GM sought to mimic those results company wide, they didn’t send employees over to Japan as they had at Freemont. Instead, they sent managers trained in the Toyota Way and they wrote manuals, and those managers and manuals met with great resistance. Unknowingly, GM intellectualized the process and in so doing doomed its efforts. The real lesson for management is that when attempting an organizational cultural shift, the process must transcend a merely intellectual one and include an emotional catharsis, whereby workers and managers directly experience the benefits of new idea or way of being. You’ve got to make it personal.
Give a listen to this great story of the GM Freemont plant. I’d love to hear your takeaway from it. Interested in learning more about leading with a global mindset? Download our webinar below!
