As soon as we start I become aware that the others are much, much faster than me. Some things just won’t go in, or need special techniques I don’t have. Clay says things to the other people like ‘Good’ and ‘Oh, that’s good’. He says nothing to me. On the tape recording of my efforts I can just hear myself above the machine noise, ‘I’m having trouble with this one!’
Rather than one minute and eight seconds it takes me just over eight minutes. ‘Eight minutes!’ Clay says. ‘Not the worst. It once took a guy fourteen minutes.’ That guy was not currently working at the plant. Of the 2,400 ‘associates’ who were, I guessed that all of them were faster than me at the things that mattered here. After lunch I try it again. The tips of my fingers are sore and chafing. I knock it down to just over five minutes. The cars of the future are being held up all the way down the line.
Much of what the British managers were teaching me at Cowley had been learnt from the Germans running BMW production lines in Munich, and much of what the Germans in Munich had learnt came from the Japanese at Toyota City. When it came to timing at work, the Japanese were the envy of the world.
The principle of Right First Time was just one component of a much broader principle of production known as Just-in-Time (JiT). Originating at Toyota in the 1960s, JiT was as much a karmic philosophy as a practical one: in utilising this revolutionary production system, the worker and the factory became almost indistinguishable; the product that resulted – be it a widget or an ocean liner – resulted from the quest for ideal industrial harmony. The concept relied upon the elimination of waste and excess stock, a streamlined logistical supply chain, a highly flexible and motivated workforce, self-contained but interlinked production units, and every possible attempt to eradicate the possibility of mistakes. Clearly, not all of these involved time in terms of minutes and hours, but the aim was to combine all these elements within the most symphonically well-proportioned timeframe to create a plant working at full efficiency, capacity and profitability. The key was the elimination of waiting and a frictionless flow. The goal, as at the Mini plant, was to maximise profit by eliminating errors and unpredictability; in effect, this entailed making humans interact as smoothly as oiled cogs. Machines do not return late from Burger King, and they do not push the andon button, and only when programmed to do so would they use scanners as hammers.
JiT achieved its ultimate and most visible level of ‘leanness’ at Toyota in the 1980s, and although there is evidence of the practice at Japanese shipyards and other factories before this, it was the car manufacturer’s methods that would be most influential throughout the West in the last three decades of the century (not least at that bastion of automation, Ford).
A further innovation at Toyota had a similarly influential effect. Just-in-Time strategies on the factory floor had enabled the company to produce cars many times faster in the late 1970s than was possible a decade before, but the customer was only benefitting marginally from the increase. The sales division at Toyota had not made a comparable improvement in leanness, and it could still take almost a month for orders to be registered, financed, transmitted to the factory and delivered. Management at the company realised something that seems obvious to us today: patience was not a virtue that many consumers held dear. In 1982, when Toyota combined its manufacturing and sales divisions, it established a far more cohesive computer system that streamlined the old method of customer orders being conducted in batches, a method that bottlenecked vital information and wasted much time. Analysing the results of this move a few years later in the Harvard Business Review, George Stalk, Jr, the senior vice-president of the Boston Consulting Group, observed that Toyota had expected to cut the sales and distribution cycle time in half: from four to six weeks to just two to three weeks across Japan. But by 1987 the cycle had shrunk to eight days, including the time required to make the car. ‘The results were predictable,’ Stalk writes. ‘Shorter sales forecasts, lower costs, happier customers.’1
But Just-in-Time is only one example of how the Japanese manipulated the concept of industrial time and gained a global advantage before the rest of the world caught up by copying it. For another glimpse we should leave the car industry for a moment and look at the lessons learned in the motorcycle industry. The battle between the Honda and Yamaha motorcycle divisions in the early 1980s was so fierce, and the outcome of the battle so decisive, that it became an industry fable. It even had a shorthand moniker: the H–Y War.
The conflict began in 1981, with Yamaha building a new factory that it claimed would make it the biggest motorbike company in the world. Honda, which currently held that position, predictably did not react kindly to the claim and did several things to ensure it wouldn’t happen. It cut its prices, ramped up its marketing budget and galvanised its workers around a new war cry: ‘Yamaha wo tsubusu!’, which translated as ‘We will crush, squash, slaughter Yamaha!’ At the root of this proposed devastation lay an entirely new approach: after sweeping structural changes, Honda was able to dramatically increase the speed at which it introduced new models and turned around its stock. Within the space of 18 months it introduced or replaced 113 models, improving its manufacturing time by 80 per cent. In the same period Yamaha managed only 37 model changes. Some of the changes to Honda’s new machines were cosmetic, but there were also many engine and other technical improvements, and the intent was clear: we have everything any biker could ever need, and we will react faster than any of our competitors to changes in new technology and fashion. The fear of obsolescence that concerns the modern consumer was thus allayed, and Honda not only succeeded in seeing off its immediate competition, but also its other rivals Suzuki and Kawasaki. (In a humiliating climb-down, Yamaha’s president announced, ‘We want to end the H–Y War. It is our fault. Of course there will be competition in the future but it will be based on a mutual recognition of our respective positions.’)
Other companies learnt from the examples of both Honda and Toyota. Matsushita cut the manufacturing time of washing machines from 360 hours to 2; companies making white goods in the US managed comparable improvements. ‘For any company in any industry, the key is not to get stuck with a single simple notion of its source of advantage,’ Stalk wrote in the Harvard Business Review. ‘The best competitors, the most successful ones, know how to keep moving and always stay on the cutting edge. Today, time is on the cutting edge. The ways leading companies manage time – in production, in new product development and introduction, in sales and distribution – represent the most powerful new sources of competitive advantage.’2
At the Mini plant at Cowley, the influence of Honda and Toyota was everywhere. All the Just-in-Time advances in response times and inventory reductions and streamlined factory layout were evident, as was the ever-increasing variety of models and customisable options. A huge investment in plant capacity and expertise in 2000 meant that production increased from 42,395 cars in 2001 to 160,037 in 2002, and it would keep growing to meet demand from – of all places – Japan. The consumer, increasingly keen to buy better faster, benefitted from greater choice and keener delivery times, and BMW, Mini and the staff on the outskirts of Oxford were the beneficiaries in terms of increased orders, output and profit.
But a runaway success will quickly become a runaway disaster without a decent set of brakes. One reason the Mini was such a hit was because owners trusted the manufacturing as much as they loved the marketing, and the managers trusted the staff not to let the manufacturing slip. And thus was I cruelly exposed. Because of my very poor speeds on the electrical connections for the airbag control box, the people in charge of the assembly line thought it best that I wasn’t let loose on real moving cars. There were customers all over the world waiting anxiously for their Minis, and they didn’t want the production slowed by even five minutes, or the possibility of things wired up in a way that, somewhere down the line, could lead to court cases.
ii) The Boss from Hell
Before the joke went out of fashion, people in
business were fond of describing a management consultant as someone who borrowed your watch to tell you the time. And once it was true.
A century ago, the pioneer of management consultancy, a man named Fredrick Winslow Taylor, hit upon a way to jump-start industrial production in the United States by going into an underperforming factory with a stopwatch and timing what he saw. Mostly what he saw was a combination of indolence and inefficiency, and his solutions were straightforward and exacting. He calculated that the fastest time a specific task could be performed was usually much faster than the time it was being performed. He called the slack working practice ‘soldiering’, and informed factory owners that if their business was to flourish, all would do well to adopt his new and precisely timed practices. Inevitably, his recommendations did not endear him to workers or their unions; from nowhere, they suddenly appeared to have a new boss from hell. Taylor talked of the pride a fully occupied worker would take in the newly optimised working day, while his detractors accused him of caring little for the physical or psychological effects of his new methods. But his ideas took hold, particularly when factory owners saw their production double and profits multiply within a couple of years.3
Taylor’s theories were shaped at the Midvale Steel Works near his birthplace in Philadelphia. Rising through the ranks between 1878 and 1890, Taylor managed to meet the huge demand from the railroad and munitions factories by boosting efficiency and eliminating waste; he almost trebled output. He achieved similar success at a paper mill and another steel works, and added to his family wealth with a new steel-cutting technique he pioneered with his associate Maunsel White. In the words of his biographer Robert Kanigel, the people he worked with saw ‘the world speed up before their eyes’.
Taylor would never use the words ‘human’, ‘cog’ and ‘machine’ in the same sentence. He initially called his principles ‘task management’, later adopting the title ‘scientific management’. But as his methods spread rapidly through American industry and then to the far reaches of the world, most people just settled for ‘Taylorism’. His defining manifesto was published in New York in 1911, a grandstanding hustings-style appeal to make the nation great again. The pamphlet was accompanied by an illustration showing a hand grasping a stopwatch – a persuasive notion of grand destiny underpinned by empirical science.4
His monograph – and we should remember that it was written more than a century ago – opened with an assertion that may strike today’s reader as familiar: ‘We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight.’ But the biggest waste was rooted in human inefficiency. This, in Taylor’s estimation, was a blunder that could only be corrected by great imagination and scientific training. ‘In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first,’ he claimed, arguing that ‘the great men’ once thought essential for the future of all prosperous industry could now be superseded by ordinary men schooled in modern methods.
By modern methods Taylor meant his own. ‘Among the various methods and implements used in each element of each trade there is always one method and one implement which is quicker and better than any of the rest,’ he wrote. ‘And this one best method and best implement can only be discovered or developed through a scientific study and analysis of all of the methods and implements in use, together with accurate, minute, motion and time study. This involves the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.’
His ‘science’ was observational and data-driven. Workers would be studied in situ performing their daily tasks, and Taylor would go around with his stopwatch marking the smallest of details: how long it took to ‘set tire on machine ready to turn . . . Rough face front edge . . . Finish face front edge . . . Rough bore front . . . Finish bore front.’ He was fascinated with the ideal time it would take to fully load a shovel, and precisely how much that shovel should carry for optimal efficiency; when the amount was known, he ordered new shovels just for the task. No one had measured these kind of tasks in such detail before, or given such a high-handed purpose to doing so. After the temporal breakdown, each machinist would be given an instruction sheet and management guidance on how best to accomplish the task using as little ‘foot-pound’ as possible.5 Each worker was then rewarded with a slightly higher wage if the tasks were performed satisfactorily within Taylor’s new guidelines. In a crude sense it was the start of the methods we have seen in post-war Japan; ‘Just-in-Time’ was Taylorism mechanised, supersized and rehumanised.
How original was Taylor’s focus on time in the workplace? It was certainly novel in its rigour and rhetoric, but it contained several elements that those schooled in English factories would have recognised from a century before. As early as 1832 Charles Babbage published On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, a work that suggested how the best placement and use of spinning and weaving looms may yield the greatest results, and also how a division of the workforce should separate unskilled manual labour from those with greater ability, and pay them accordingly. Babbage, best remembered today as the father of programmable computing, acknowledged that he was merely advancing the earlier thinking of the Italian political economist Melchiorre Gioia, and both of them were digesting the eighteenth-century free-market manifestos of Adam Smith. But it was the detail in Taylor’s work that set him apart, and his ruthless polemic.6
Taylor diagnosed something that his predecessors had not: a disease of national laziness. He claimed that American and English sportsmen were the best in the world, eagerly straining every sinew for victory. And then they went to work and shirked. His definition of ‘soldiering’ had two branches: the natural and the systematic. The first was symptomatic of the human condition, ‘the natural instinct and tendency of men to take it easy’. The second was institutional, a belief that working faster than your fellow worker was disloyal and disruptive, favouring the management over one’s own class; there was a feeling too that working faster would ultimately lead to less employment.7 In 1903, in a paper entitled ‘Shop Management’, Taylor gave the example of a man who lived his life at two different speeds.
While going and coming from work [he] would walk at a speed of from three to four miles per hour, and not infrequently trot home after a day’s work. On arriving at his work he would immediately slow down to a speed of about one mile an hour. When, for example, wheeling a loaded wheelbarrow, he would go at a good fast pace even up hill in order to be as short a time as possible under load, and immediately on the return walk slow down to a mile an hour, improving every opportunity for delay short of actually sitting down. In order to be sure not to do more than his lazy neighbor, he would actually tire himself in his effort to go slow.
Ultimately the key to efficiency lay not in the strict enforcement of new rules, but in education and coercion. Antagonism between management and worker should be replaced by an understanding of the virtuous circle: increased production would lead to a lower price for a product, and thus greater sales, more profits, higher wages, and ultimate expansion and greater employment. That this was not already self-evident at the beginning of the twentieth century, Taylor thought astonishing. ‘There is no question that, throughout the industrial world, a large part of the organization of employers, as well as employee, is for war rather than for peace, and that perhaps the majority on either side do not believe that it is possible so to arrange their mutual relations that their interests become identical.’
War and soldiering of a different sort would soon underline the need for maximum production in a way Taylor’s tracts never could, although his death in 1915 robbed him of the satisfaction of witnessing it. In the century that followed, Taylor’s reputation has risen and fallen. In 1918, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences acclaimed him as ‘the legitimate successor of James Watt’, suggesting that his work would ‘equally transform society’. Others have regarded his methods as suffocatingly hierarchical; t
he layered application of additional supervisors within a new management structure was just the thing that monolithic companies would later attempt to shed as the century reached its close.
Despite his stated hope for harmony, Taylorism led to much workforce discontent; staff turnover at the factories employing his methods increased substantially, and railroads and steel mills ground to a halt in protest. And by all accounts Taylor was not a pleasant man to do business with, displaying many of the traits – bullishness, self-aggrandisement, profanity – he claimed that management should avoid. Justifying his exacting division of labour, he once commented that a man who was ‘physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron’.
Taylor’s ‘science’ has long been ripe for parody, although the work most commonly held up as the great satire of inhumane industry, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), is as much an attack on the Ford-style assembly line as it is on Taylor’s management techniques. Chaplin plays a bolt-tightener making an unspecified product for the ‘Electro Steel Corp’. At the very start of the film (after the credits presented over the face of a large clock), a scene of herded sheep merges with a crowd of workers exiting a subway station, and the suggestion of ‘lambs to the slaughter’ is clear. Chaplin is billed simply as ‘A Factory Worker’. The automated meal he’s fed while strapped to a chair consists of metal nuts from malfunctioning parts. His manicured boss twice issues instructions to make his conveyor belt go faster.8
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