Toyota

As I sit here on the bus I'm listening to a podcast about NUMMI, a GM car plant that was shut down then reopened under a completely different style of managment: the Japanese Tiyota company style management that emphasized team work and collaboration between management and workers. It's interesting that this concept of teamwork, which worked for NUMMI and could be considered an ideograph with unexamined assumptions, became part of the problem when it was attempted in a different plant that was on the brink of failure. Teamwork and collaboration between management and workers actually produced competition. I need to listen to this again to outline the specifics of this, but ultimately it produced snitching and undermined the seniority that many workers had been working decades to achieve. What was welcomed (eventually, after training and team building prior to implementation) was wildly unpopular at the second plant. And when workers tried to Make suggestions and implement changes as production happened, part of the Japanese ideal of continuous improvement, the second plant found that GM lacked the company support and infrastructure to actually improve and make changes. NUMMI was able to rely on Toyota to support the team/ continuous improvement ideal. And Toyota knew this, which is why they were so open to letting GM see its processes. They knew without infrastructure these ideas would never work. It makes me wonder how we as writers and students can work for change, knowing we may not have the support of our meritocracy society. It gives me more sympathy for Coogan's desire to work within academic structures to do student centered service learning.