› Is your team driving in the right direction?

The other day I came across this podcast on the NUMMI car plant in Fremont  California which recently shut down production.  When I read Chris Brogan’s post A Perfect Dichotomy I realized this struggle isn’t simply just an operations phenomenon – but one of more broad-ranging applications across all business.

Summary of the podcast: A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: how it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn’t learn the lessons – until it was too late

I think this should be required listening for anyone who in charge of operations, leadership, managing teams or faced with evaluating innovation. 

Some key takeaways:

- alignment of goals – once everyone was moving in the same direction, success followed

- importance of process – the same people were able to implement the new system

- adopting teamwork concepts – all levels of an organization need to ‘buy in’

- impact of ‘doing things right the first time’ – correcting problems later is incredibly inefficient

- willingness to accept new ways of doing things – openness is necessary for survival

We try to instill these values throughout our firm but sometimes it is hard to articulate why taking shortcuts doesn’t pay off.  This case study is a really powerful example.

Check out this podcast- and ask yourself these hard questions- does your firm take shortcuts it knows will sacrifice quality?  Are processes in place that actually enable poor-performance to go uncorrected?  Please share your experience.

Posted at 5/14/10 by tking in GGGroup, Industry Trends, News & Views Tags: Best Practices, Chris Brogan, Management, Nummi, Operations, Process, This American Life | No Comments »