The "This American Life" piece on the NUMMI factory was great, and triple-underlined a few points in the article, especially the importance of having a unified

The "This American Life" piece on the NUMMI factory was great, and triple-underlined a few points in the article, especially the importance of having a unified vision, and getting all decision-makers on board. According to the piece, the major difference between the Japanese and American production methods involved flagging defects. If an American stopped the line for anything, they would be fired. So cars rolled down the line with fatal defects, needing either expensive repairs or a trip to the trash heap. On the other hand, Japanese workers were encouraged to stop the line for any flaws they saw. This limited the loss to individual parts and components, rather than entire automobiles. This sounds like Apple's 10->3->1 approach: design flaws are discarded as soon as possible. The piece also asserted that GM failed to adopt these measures for two reasons: upper management deferred to individual plant managers for the practices to be used in each factory, and the plant managers preferred the don't-stop-the-line approach, since they already knew it. There was no Apple-like process in place to convince plant managers that they needed to switch their methods, so they never did.