How to change culture: The NUMMI case study

- I'm gonna tell a story that geographically is very close to me. About 30 minutes from where I live in the East Bay in California is a factory, which is now the Tesla factory. However, that factory has a long and storied history. If you go back to the 1980s, it was a General Motors factory and it was the worst GM factory in the whole of North America. It was producing the worst cars, relationships between workers, and management had completely broken down to the point where workers were smoking and taking drugs and gambling on the job. They would deliberately sabotage the cars by putting Coke bottles in the doors so that they would rattle when they opened and shut and the product was so bad that GM shut the plant down. At around the same time, GM and Toyota in Japan created a joint partnership. GM wanted to learn how to build small cars profitably and they also had heard about the Toyota production system and wanted to learn a little bit about that. At the same time, Toyota wanted to…