So this is the lesson of Japanese management,
that it turned out that Frederick Taylor wasn't right,
that trying to get engineers to design the jobs for people was not optimal.
And that they could probably do a better job themselves, and if nothing else,
they're at least much more engaged in it.
Now what's the downside of this Toyota lean production system?
The downside for management is that the workers are in control now.
You don't have a group of engineers who are part of management designing
everything.
The workers in the plant are in charge.
And one of the things that Japanese style management does very differently and
noticeably on assembly lines is it gives the individual worker
the power to stop the line if there are quality problems.
Because they want them fixed then,
they don't want more cars coming off with quality problems.
And the idea of letting an individual worker shut down an assembly line,
to US managers, seemed insane.
It cost about $50,000 a minute to shut down an assembly line, right, but the idea
of giving them the control to do that seemed crazy, and that's the trade off.
If you engage workers, you have to give them some control over what they're doing.
And in that sense, it's very much the opposite of the story we told at
the beginning of the series about Mother's Restaurant in New Orleans.
The one where you had people standing over the shoulder of the cashier trying to make
sure nobody's cheating.
In the Toyota system, a lean production,
the supervisors are not there watching people.
The employees are making the decisions themselves and
if they decided to screw things up, it would be really hard to stop them, right?
If they started stopping the assembly line just to irritate the management team,
it would be really difficult.
So some of the resistance that US managers brought to adopting these
practices from Japan were partly not invented here, just common.
But also we don't trust the workers enough to give them the control that would
be necessary to get them to perform in a much more effective way.
So where else do we see organizations adopting models like this,
like the lean production system?
Well, you see it a lot in healthcare now where there's a recognition that teams
of workers are really the important unit.
The nurses and doctors have to work together with technicians.
They gotta be talking to each other.
They ought to be making decisions about the best way to provide care
at the patient's bed.
You see it in some notable other examples.
One of them is Southwest Airlines,
which is a company that has a very different way of doing things.
Their particular problem which initiated almost randomly was that they
were about to go out of business and they had to sell one of their airplanes.
The very early days of the airline, they had four planes,
they had to sell one of them.
And they went to the employees and say, we gotta figure out a way to operate the same
route schedule with three planes rather than four.
And the only way you could do that is if you turn the planes around faster
at each airport, right.
So you’re not spending as much time at the gate, you’re getting in,
you’re getting out fast.
And if you can do that, it’s incredibly cheaper, more productive,
you don’t need as many planes, a plane is a really expensive thing.
So the employees figured out how to do that and
it’s really a way of just cooperating with each other.
Different workgroups that under the Taylor system would never talk to each other,
baggage handlers, gate agents, pilots,
each separately managed and in their own little world, right,
now trying to work together in order to solve problems and coordinate, right.
So one of the things you notice about Southwest which you don't notice for
a lot of other airlines is that you rarely pull up to the gate and
surprise the crew there, right?
It's often the case of other airlines,
you pull in and nobody is there to greet the plane
because they're in a separate workgroup following their own schedule, right.
Maybe the plane got in a little early.
You would like these people to be able to talk to each other and communicate.
And to that you can’t have supervisors necessarily standing over them and
telling them what to do.
Well, that also means, again, if the employees are in charge and
they’re in control, that they’re better be happy.
And if they get unhappy with you, you got a big problem, right,
because they could shut the thing down in a heartbeat.
So Southwest, in particular, spends a lot of time making sure their employees they
are happy and making sure that they're happy with the airline so that they will
engage their discretionary effort, which is a key phrase in management.
That is the kinds of things they could do if they wanted to do,
but they probably don't have to do, and it's hard to make them do it, right?
And that is solve problems when they see them happening,
without a supervisor having to come over and tell them what to do, right.
But for management this is often pretty scary because you are giving up control to
the employees, particularly the employees that you're supposed to be supervising.
Now if you can do it, you see an enormous productivity improvement like this, and
that productivity improvement is you don't need as many supervisors, right, and
they're pretty expensive.