GM

"He declared in a press inter¬ view that the directors ought to buy GM cars, instead of receiving specially fixed up vehicles as perks, in order to understand the ordinary customer’s situation. Perot spoke of “nuking the GM system” by exiling managers from their expensive offices to the plants, where they would be close to designers and workers.37 He jabbed at GM’s huge capital spending program: “We are spending billions to develop new cars. This isn’t a moon shot; it’s just a car.”38"

"The first EDSer to see a snake kills it. At GM, first thing you do is organize a committee on snakes. Then you bring in a consultant who knows a lot about snakes. . . .Then you talk about it for a year.39"

"Horse trader Perot once again pressed his advantage. “I just kept making obscene demands,” he said, “and they kept agreeing to them.”41 When the dickering was finished, Perot had extracted a buyout price almost double the stock’s prevailing market quotation.42 The nearly $750 million proceeds to Perot represented a tripling of the value of his GM stake in the space of just two years (during which the company’s condition markedly deteriorated).4"

"To safeguard those millions, Raskob left his position as the chief fi nancial offi cer of the DuPont Company to take over GM’s fi nances. Billy Durant, GM’s founder, became Raskob’s new partner in corporate adventure. Raskob found the capital Durant said he needed to grow the business. Quickly enough, Raskob discovered that his new partner could not have been more diff erent than the old one. Pierre du Pont was a rock steady, by-the-numbers corporate strategist. Durant had risk-taking zest and dreamed of every American family owning one or even two gleaming cars. Together, he and Durant were building not just a company but a new industry, a new way of life."

"Opacity. The development of TPS should tip us off to the long time constant inevitably faced by would-be imitators. The system was fashioned from the bottom up, over decades of trial and error. The fundamental tenets were never formally codified, and much of the organizational knowledge remained tacit, rather than explicit. It would not be an exaggeration to say that even Toyota did not have a full, top-down understanding of what they had created—it took fully fifteen years, for instance, before they were able to transfer TPS to their suppliers. GM’s experience with NUMMI also implies the tacit character of this knowledge: even when Toyota wanted to illuminate their work processes, they could not entirely do so."

"On the surface, it consists of a fairly straightforward variety of interlocking procedures, such as just-in-time production, kaizen (continuous improvement), kanban (inventory control), andon cords (devices to allow workers to stop production and identify a problem so it can be fixed). Observing all this, GM workers naturally assumed you could clone TPS by copying these procedures."

"Apple was different: under the design direction of Jony Ive, Apple’s product portfolio remained radically simplified. Even by 2015, Apple was only releasing two new iPhones a year. They were hand crafting luxury phones but doing it in mass-market quantities. In their search for suppliers, Apple gravitated toward quality, not price. To reach that quality, Apple had to come up with new processes to make the phones; but until Apple chose a new design these processes wouldn’t exist. So it had to work far more intimately with suppliers. “Apple influenced the entire manufacturing process because what they were doing was so unique. Nobody else was doing this, so Apple had to fund that equipment,” says Brian Blair, a tech analyst who repeatedly toured Apple’s suppliers back then. He uses an analogy from the automotive world: it’s one thing for Volkswagen or GM to make 10 million cars a year; what Apple was doing was akin to making 10 million Ferraris a year."

"In her book on Sir Ron Brierley, Yvonne van Dongen writes that Heatley’s suggestion of buying GM showed ‘it was obvious he was not BIL material’.[11](private://read/01jectdbce729daxqkxt7cbe8r/#mn16) Collins is kinder. ‘Craig’s thought processes had no real boundaries,’ he says. ‘He was not constrained by things the way we were. While we were huge by New Zealand standards, in a lot of ways we were very constrained and we tended to look at existing companies and not stray too far from the things that we knew, whereas Craig had not been around for that long and didn’t tend to see those boundaries. He looked at things quite differently.’"

"Salvation came from an unlikely quarter. Jenkins spent a lot of time with Steyr, an Austrian firm that made PTOs, trying to resolve their problem with the GM PTO. In frustration he asked them one day to nominate their best PTO; they pointed to the one attached to the Land Rover Freelander engine, the KV6. Jenkins went back to London, bought a Freelander, ripped the engine out and started tests on its PTO. Its performance was an order of magnitude better than anything else they’d tried. The KV6 was also a tidy engine that delivered the power they needed and was very compact. The next problem was to persuade the owners of Rover to let them use the engine for the project, which they did only after Gibbs had been through ‘somersaults and hoops of burning fire’."