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"New GM" refers to the smaller part of the company that will be kept going.

Since Pontiac is being killed, and since NUMMI makes the Pontiac Vibe, the excuse for dumping NUMMI is that they aren't making Pontiacs anymore.

But why not make something there, if Toyota was willing to continue as partner?

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GM is popping NUMMI in the "Old GM" basket to be liquidated so they can focus their energy on the "New GM".
Is it just me or am I missing something here?

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Seems like a perfectly reasonable defense mechanism.

Still sad. I don't blame those guys as much for their bad attitude now.

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In my work as the Lean Recruiter I've interviewed at least several dozen former NUMMI executives and managers over the last 10+ years. Not one of those returning to GM truly believed that he or she ever had a chance of actually implementing TPS back at the mother ship.

How sad.

Adam Zak

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Some analyst on Bloomberg said:
Does Toyota “take full ownership of a plant that’s in the most expensive place in the U.S., and that’s also got a UAW workforce, or close it and eliminate thousands of jobs?,” said Ed Kim, director of industry analysis at AutoPacific Inc. in Tustin, California. “Both scenarios are bad.”

Art Smalley (associated with the LEI) was quoted as:

“It’s always been a high-cost facility,” said Art Smalley, a production efficiency consultant with the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Lean Enterprise Institute. “They have to lean toward closing it, unless they can figure out some kind of high-volume product to put in there that can really generate a profit,” said Smalley, who is also a former Toyota engineer.

The LEI's Jim Womack was quoted in the NY Times as saying:

“It’s the end of a remarkable educational experiment,” said James P. Womack, the chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute, an organization in Cambridge, Mass., that promotes efficiency in manufacturing and commerce.

“The product was never the point at this plant,” Mr. Womack said. “It was a way for Toyota to figure out how to apply its system in the United States and for G.M. to try to figure out how Toyota was doing the things it was doing.”

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Our early introductions to Lean included Paul Adler's articles on the creation of NUMMI so it does hold an important place in our learning, like Dr Pete too.

And what is all this "Old GM" vs "New GM" how old & how new are these businesses. Didn't at least one fail as a business model?

Thanks for advice on this one, we are a bit out loop down under.

Mike

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But thanks for linking the New York Times article from 1989 and your 2005 NUMMI tour. It brought back a lot of memories. When I was doing my mid career MBA in the early1980s, one of the cases we studied in our Organizational Development course was the GM plant in Fremont, California. The case was all about the horrendous labor-management dysfunction there, which included frequent sabotage of the assembly line by the union workers. The book containing the case was published before the plant was shut down in 1982, so it is very interesting to get the next chapter in the story.

One thing that struck me first was how much of the old GM culture the re-hired workers brought back with them — fear of layoffs, et cetera. It makes you recall how we think we hire "new people". In truth, we only hire "used people" who bring all their old baggage with them. Another striking thing was the mistaken impressions regarding the method behind Andon cords, maintaining the pace (Takt time) and problem solving.

The comments from the union leaders and the People’s Caucus are truly hilarious. It's a demonstration of how we humans are much better at tracking "being offended" than we are at tracking "being effective". It has me appreciate the courage of Toyota in taking all this on and the mainly positive results it produced.
/Dr. Pete

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