Joe’s team leader was standing nearby. That man’s manager had been shadowing Toyoda as he walked through the factory, so he was orbiting nearby as well. When Joe glanced up, he saw a half dozen of the plant’s most senior executives staring back.
“Joe, please,” Toyoda said. Then he stepped over, took Joe’s hand in his own and guided it to the andon cord, and together they pulled. A flashing light began spinning. When the chassis reached the end of Joe’s station without the taillight correctly in place, the line stopped moving. Joe was shaking so much, he had to hold his crowbar with both hands. He finally got the taillight positioned and, with a terrified glance at his bosses, reached up and pulled the andon cord, restarting the line.
Toyoda faced Joe and bowed. He began speaking in Japanese.
“Joe, please forgive me,” a lieutenant translated. “I have done a poor job of instructing your managers of the importance of helping you pull the cord when there is a problem. You are the most important part of this plant. Only you can make every car great. I promise I will do everything in my power to never fail you again.”
By lunchtime, everyone inside the factory had heard the story. The next day, andon cords were pulled more than a dozen times. The next week, more than two dozen times. A month later, the plant was averaging nearly a hundred pulls a day.
The importance of the andon cords and the employee suggestions and Toyoda’s apology was that they demonstrated that the fate of the company was in the employees’ hands. “There was a genuine devotion to convincing employees they were part of a family,” said Joel Smith, the UAW representative at NUMMI. “It had to be reinforced constantly, but it was real. We might have disagreements or see things differently, but at the end of the day, we were committed to each other’s success.”
“If people started pulling andons for no good reason, the plant would have fallen apart,” said Smith. Everyone knew it still cost thousands of dollars each minute a line was stopped, “and that anyone could stop the line, at any time, without penalty. So employees could bankrupt the place if they wanted to.
“Once you’re entrusted with that kind of authority, you can’t help feel a sense of responsibility,” said Smith. “The most junior workers didn’t want NUMMI to go bankrupt, and the management didn’t want that, and so, suddenly, everyone was on the same side of the table.” And as workers were empowered to make more choices, their motivation skyrocketed. Just as Mauricio Delgado and the U.S. Marine Corps had found in other settings, when workers felt a greater sense of control, their drive expanded.
Word of the NUMMI experiment spread quickly. When professors from Harvard Business School visited a few years after the plant reopened, they found that former GM employees who once spent only forty-five seconds of every minute working now averaged fifty-seven seconds of labor per minute. By 1986, “NUMMI’s productivity was higher than that of any other GM facility and more than twice that of its predecessor, GM-Fremont,” they wrote. Absenteeism had dropped from 25 percent during the GM days to 3 percent under NUMMI. There were no observable levels of substance abuse, prostitution, or sabotage. The formal grievance system was hardly ever used. NUMMI’s productivity was as high as that of plants in Japan, “even though its workers were, on average, ten years older and much less experienced with the Toyota production system,” the Harvard researchers wrote. In 1985, Car and Driver magazine printed an issue with the cover line “Hell Freezes Over,” announcing NUMMI’s accomplishments. The worst auto factory on earth had become one of the most productive plants in existence, using the same workers as before.
Then, four years after NUMMI opened, the recession hit the auto industry. The stock market crashed. Unemployment was rising. Car sales plummeted. NUMMI’s managers estimated they needed to reduce production by 40 percent. “Everyone was saying there were going to be layoffs,” said Smith, the UAW rep. Instead, the plant’s top sixty-five executives all took pay cuts. Assembly line workers were reassigned to janitorial duties or landscaping, or sent into the paint room to scrape air vents instead of let go. The company proved it was committed.
“After that, workers were willing to do anything for the company,” Smith said. “Four separate sales slumps over thirty years, and NUMMI never did layoffs once. And each time, when the business finally came back, everyone worked harder than before.”
Rick Madrid retired from NUMMI in 1992, after almost four decades of building cars. Three years later, the Smithsonian mounted an exhibit at the National Museum of American History that included Madrid’s ID badge and his hat in a show named A Palace of Progress. NUMMI, the curators wrote, was iconic, a factory that had demonstrated it was possible to unite workers and managers around a common cause through mutual commitment and shared power.
Even now NUMMI is cited inside business schools and by corporate chieftains as an example of what organizations can achieve when a commitment culture takes hold. Since NUMMI was founded, the “lean manufacturing” principles have infiltrated nearly every corner of American commerce, from Silicon Valley to Hollywood to healthcare. “I’m really glad I ended up my years as an autoworker at NUMMI,” Madrid said. “I went from being depressed, bored, people didn’t even know I existed, to seeing J. D. Power name NUMMI as a top quality plant.”
NUMMI’s workers got together for a party after that J. D. Power announcement. “And when I spoke, I said, we’re the best damn autoworkers in the world,” said Madrid. “Not just the workers. Not just the managers. All of us, together, are the best, because we’re devoted to each other.”
III.
Six years before Frank Janssen was kidnapped, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had reached out to a thirty-four-year-old Wall Street executive to see if he would be interested in overseeing development of the bureau’s technology systems. Chad Fulgham had never worked in law enforcement before. His specialty was developing large computer networks for investment banks such as Lehman Brothers and JPMorgan Chase. So he was surprised when he received a call in 2008 explaining that the FBI wanted an interview.
Improving the bureau’s technology had long been a priority for federal officials. As early as 1997, the FBI’s top leaders had promised Congress they would deliver an overhauled system that tied together the dozens of internal databases and analytical engines the bureau maintained. This network, officials said, would give agents powerful new tools for connecting the dots among disparate cases. But by the time the bureau contacted Fulgham eleven years later, work on that system, Sentinel, had already consumed $305 million with no end in sight. The agency had brought in an outside group to figure out why Sentinel was taking so long. The experts said the bureau was so bogged down by bureaucracy and conflicting agendas that it would take tens of millions of dollars simply to get the program back on track.