In 2007, I wrote about a BBC article that included a number I've never quite been able to shake. Workers at Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky plant were pulling the andon cord – the mechanism that lets any worker stop the line when they spot a problem – about 2,000 times a week. Workers at a brand-new Ford truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were pulling it twice.
The BBC framed the gap as “generations of mistrust” between shop-floor workers and management. Jeff Liker and others I've talked to since have added texture. Ford had put serious effort into that plant. They'd worked with former Toyota Georgetown people for a couple of years before opening. They'd created a team leader role, because without someone offline and ready to respond, an andon signal just creates chaos. Then, finance looked at comparable output and quality data at a sister plant running without the team leader structure, and the rest of the story wrote itself.
That 2007 post has lived on. It gets linked to a lot. And the question it raises has never really gone away.
So here's what I'm trying to figure out now: Did it get better?
Not “how did Ford fix it” – that presumes an answer I don't have. The honest question is whether Ford's andon culture, or their broader quality culture, actually improved over the nineteen years since the BBC article. Whether the improvement held. Whether it regressed. Whether it was ever as bad or as simple as the BBC framing suggested.
What I'm hearing
The former Ford people I've reached out to recently – executives, plant-level Lean practitioners, internal FPS consultants, and quality leaders – have mostly converged on the same read. The Alan Mulally era (2006 through 2014) brought real cultural improvement. People stopped hiding problems. Quality metrics improved. The “red, yellow, green” status-reporting story, where executives finally started showing problems honestly in Business Plan Review meetings, became a Lean folklore fixture for a reason. It worked.
What I keep hearing is that much of that improvement has since eroded.
One former Ford executive told me bluntly that the Mulally era “dramatically improved the culture and organizational performance. But sadly most of that has slipped away.” A widely respected Lean scholar said essentially the same thing: he's “pretty sure the culture is not better now.”
A former Ford Lean coach wrote me a long email describing his own plant – a Shingo Prize winner, no less – where “keep the line running, we'll fix it in the repair bays” coexisted with all the FPS tools and training. He told me the Cleveland Production System, built with genuine Toyota Georgetown alumni involvement, got absorbed into the Modern Ford Production System and lost much of its culture along the way. Ford had adopted the tools. The tools, on their own, weren't enough.
That last point is the thesis of the book I'm writing. So of course it fits what I'm hearing. Which is exactly why I want to push on it before I publish anything that leans on it.
A pattern I should name
As I've been reaching out to former Ford Lean practitioners, I noticed something worth saying out loud.
Almost all of them left Ford between 2003 and 2008.
There are reasonable explanations. Ford announced the “Way Forward” restructuring in 2006 and cut tens of thousands of jobs in the following years. Lean and continuous improvement roles are often early casualties in cost-reduction cycles. The Lean community was mobile in the mid-2000s as other companies built their own programs. People's career endpoints happened to cluster in that window for ordinary reasons.
But I don't have firsthand sources who stayed at Ford through the Mulally era and beyond. The people telling me the culture improved and then eroded are telling me that from outside – from their post-Ford vantage, from their networks, from hearing things secondhand.
That's a real limit on what I know. I can't claim confidently that the Mulally-era improvement held for eight years and then collapsed if my sources mostly left the company before Mulally arrived. The story may be true. Two credible senior voices converging isn't nothing. But it isn't proof, and I'd rather say so than write around it.
What I'm missing
I'd like to hear from anyone who worked at a Ford facility in any role between roughly 2005 and today and saw the andon system, the line-stop culture, or the broader quality culture from the inside. Supervisors, operators, skilled trades, UAW members, engineers, quality specialists, and managers all welcome. What I'm especially hoping to find is someone who stayed past 2014, when Mulally left – that's the window where the sources I have can't help me.
I'm also open to hearing from current Ford employees. If you don't want your name or role attached to anything, that's fine.
How to share
I've set up an anonymous form below where you can tell me what you saw. Email is optional. If you leave one, only I'll see it, and I won't publish or share it. If you leave it blank, there's no way for me to contact you back – which some people will prefer, and that's the point.
You can also leave a comment on this post – anonymously if you'd like, or under your name. Comments are moderated, and I won't publish anything that names specific individuals without corroboration.
If you'd rather email directly, I'm at mark@markgraban.org.
Thanks for being willing to share. Everything here is anonymous unless you choose to leave your email at the end. This isn't a survey – feel free to answer only the questions you have something to say about. You can be as specific or as general as you're comfortable with.
A few things worth saying about how I'll handle what comes in. I'm not going to publish single-source accusations as fact. I will look for patterns across multiple accounts. If someone shares something that sounds like it could be corroborated or disputed, I may share it with Ford for comment before publishing. I may not publish everything I hear. Some of it will shape the book's framing without ever appearing directly.
What I'm trying to do, honestly, is figure out what's true.
The 2007 post has been read a lot over the last nineteen years. I've been given credit for a framing that may or may not still hold. It seems reasonable to find out.
