Corporate Culture - Part 2 - Line Tales

"Ten Dilbert Managers" is currently making the rounds of email and internet graffiti. It’s a list of memorable quotations submitted for an unnamed magazine’s contest. Some are funny, some trite, and one from Delco Corporation is too painful to be anything but true.

Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule.

I happen to receive the email the same day The New York Times business section was running another article on the disintegration of General Motors. The quotation illustrates how widely the conflicts of central institutions percolate through their spheres of influence, and how difficult it is for companies and the managers it fosters to genuinely change.

Shared ideas sometimes pass to companies like Delco, a machine tool maker in Akron, when people migrate from one company to another. They may also diffuse through consultants who move from company to company, much like peddlers of the past who carried city ways to the countryside.

Often the most common mechanism for cultural integration is not personal experience or formal training, but stories retold in bars and over lunch. At work, I would hear them when the person directing a meeting would shift his position, signaling an informal break. Like many corporate folktales, their rendering depends on the story telling ability of the narrator and the recognition by the audience that the themes are important.

In the days before Ralph Nader and Unsafe at Any Speed, the sanctification of keeping the line running was the source of tales passed well beyond Detroit. I heard them from a salesman who sold material handling products to GM for the company where my father worked in the early 1960s. We didn’t consider ourselves an automotive town, and were more than 100 miles away, but we heard the stories.

Accountants had calculated the cost of stopping the assembly line, and no man’s job was worth halting production for poor quality, lack of parts or preventive maintenance. Anecdotes featured the ingenuity of men who saved the day. One tale I remember concerned how GM considered building an air fleet to deliver out-of-stock parts. Of course, the Japanese attacked the root problem with a new inventory system, and new relations with their suppliers.

One reason Nader and, later, Ross Perot could make their points so easily is they could draw on the local narrative tradition, and rebroadcast it to a national audience.

I had a friend who was having problems with her Oldsmobile in the 1980s. The dealer had her sign away her future litigation rights in return for one free repair. She later discovered her problems were known and came from line substitution. The dealer may have outsmarted her, may even have turned her into a tale he could retell, but I imagine she never bought another Oldsmobile.

Parenthetically, no one will ever buy a new Oldsmobile again. GM abandoned the brand as unsalvageable in 2004.

When I worked in a GM plant in the 1980s, it had new employee classes in quality management. The first day the instructor told us, if we learned nothing more, remember GIRTFT stood for "get it right the first time."

We were also told, in Japanese plants, anyone could stop work if there were problems, could actually stop the line. This was power that was tested, perhaps abused, but freedom, none the less, to upend hierarchy, to stand up to absurdity.

Still, twenty years later, a manager for an automotive supplier’s supplier, who can’t have been more than a child, may not even have been born, when line stories were evolving, is still trying to reconcile two competing messages within a failing industry: the mantra that caused the problem, and the koan that was the solution.

Delco’s home page repeats the quality training I had:

Our products are produced using the highest quality standard recognized by our industrial community to ensure your job is done right - the first time!

But elsewhere the company tells us it is known for "offering quicker turn-around time in mold building production and for operating with greater production and cost efficiency."

No wonder the quoted manager sounds confused. The sad thing is he is right: quality and production should not be incompatible. If things are done right, a schedule can be met.

When folktales deal with production, it is quality that’s the problem. For preproduction projects like Delco it could be the schedule that’s wrong, that wasn’t right the first time, or, more likely, wasn’t adjusted when problems occurred in earlier phases, leading to undue pressures for later phases to make up lost time and the impossibility of doing things right in half the time.

I had another friend who was working for a engineering subcontractor in the 1980s on a project to build a new plant. He said that at one meeting, every subcontractor in the room knew the schedule could not be met, but not one would say anything because they knew that whoever said the obvious would get the blame. Instead, each filed private minutes with his team leader reporting the true status of the project. There was no freedom to stop the line: everyone had to wait until GM said there was a problem.

We’re still waiting, because our freedom to stop the line, to stop buying does not oblige managers to pay attention. The retold anecdotes, polished into memorats, were the only way powerless workers and consumers could protest. Folklore does not arise in a vacuum. When motifs coalesce into a common narrative, anyone who respects local folk traditions knows something’s changed, knows there are serious troubles.