Tag: GM

My first job out of college was as an Industrial Engineer at the General Motors Livonia Engine Plant. Blogging didn't exist then (I didn't even have email or internet access at work) or I might have started my writing career then. Oh, the stories. I've shared some of them on this blog over time. I've blogged about papers from the Don Ephlin files, a former UAW national leader. I have my own small collection of documents and artifacts from my days at GM that I thought to keep in a folder. I still have that folder today. A few of these memos tell the story of a quality and productivity death spiral that eventually led to our plant manager being replaced. And, by "replaced," I don't mean fired or given an early retirement. He was, at least in title, PROMOTED to a role at GM Powertrain headquarters. Thankfully, the new plant manager, Larry Spiegel, was one of the original "NUMMI commandos" and he made a huge difference to the plant and to me, personally.

Today, I’m giving a keynote talk at the Lean & Six Sigma World Conference being held in Las Vegas. I don’t normally attend or speak at “Lean Sigma” events, but I had an opportunity to give a new talk that touches on two of my favorite themes in recent years – the need to apply statistics and psychology to our “Lean Management” practices or Six Sigma or whatever.

Last week, a nurse manager downloaded the free first chapter of my book Lean Hospitals and wrote this message in the contact form: "Interested to see how the disconnect between management and the staff supervised can be helped. Too many managers refuse to help those they supervise. A growing number have never done the work that they are in charge of getting done. Patients and residents feel it, not healthy. Poor PR. It does get back to the consumer. Difficult to fix at that point." In my experience working with many hospitals, her comments resonate with me. Identifying problems like these doesn't mean Lean provides easy solutions for organizational transformation.

I did manage to buy a book that was published by NUMMI to celebrate their 10th anniversary. "10 Years of Quality & Teamwork" is the title. Here is the cover and I'll share a few things that caught my attention inside. It's interesting to think through this book in the context of : Tesla (the current owners of the building - see my past blog post) Healthcare organizations

Tesla builds cars in what used to be the NUMMI factory, a joint venture between Toyota and GM (which meant it was run as a Toyota plant with "Lean" practices). Before that, it was a dysfunctional GM plant. Now that it's a Tesla plant, did they learn from Toyota or does it seem more like "the old GM?"

While I'm writing here about Northwestern men's basketball learning from Duke (without copying everything), the same ideas apply if you're Ford learning from Toyota or a hospital learning from ThedaCare.

Yesterday, the W. Edwards Deming Institute published the second in my series of three posts for them: "The Failure of "The Livonia Philosophy" at my GM Plant." Read more...

I'm extremely honored that The W. Edwards Deming Institute published my first blog post in a series of three that I've written for them, to be published over the next month or so.

I was happy to see an engineer (Chemical Engineering) and a General Motors leader, Alicia Boler Davis, on the cover of the Northwestern University...

Here's Part 2 of a post about the original NUMMI Team Member Handbook from 1984 (see Part 1 here). This, and other documents that I'll...

I recently wrote about my exploration of the collected papers of the late Don Ephlin, a UAW senior leader and a professor of mine at...

Recently, when I posted a bit from the old 1984 NUMMI Team Member Handbook (more still to come on that), it allowed me to connect...