Sally Helgesen is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and consultant, and one of the world’s brand-name experts on women’s leadership. Her latest book, The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work, is the first to make the strategic case for women leaders. 
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Aug 29, 2005 / 12:00AMChatham, NY
My fascination with the looming disaster known as the US auto industry has continued unabated over the summer. I’ve been especially intrigued by the upheaval in GM’s most successful venture in recent years, the development of the Wuling Sunshine minivan for the Chinese market. Philip Murtaugh, the executive who headed up this miracle of manufacturing and marketing in partnership with the Chinese––and who stuck his neck out by championing the vehicle inside a company with a long history of punishing passionate mavericks—has finally met his predictable fate by being forced out. The details became public over the last month, shortly before GM’s debt rating was downgraded to junk and the company decided to extend its “employee discounts” to cover the new 06 models, which it had pretty much declared it would never do.
Minus Murtaugh, the company may no longer be able to count on Chinese profits to help offset its slide in the US market. Those still holding shares in GM should take note. The rest of us, meanwhile, are left to serenely ponder this latest evidence of corporate boneheadedness by putting it in historical context.
The Wuling Sunshine saga almost precisely parallels the New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. drama of the early 80s, from which a reasonable person might have imagined GM would have learned an unforgettable lesson. NUMMI was the much-heralded partnership between Toyota and GM that was supposed to enable the US automaker to learn from Toyota’s culture, with its emphasis on the kind of teamwork, worker initiative, and trust that defines a Web of Inclusion. NUMMI was thus supposed to serve as a counterweight to GM’s long tradition of top-down centralized decision making and worker/management conflict.
Together, GM and Toyota set up a factory in Fremont, California, based on the Toyota Production System, in which job classifications were reduced to 4 (as opposed to 183 in some GM plants at the time), lines between worker and manager were blurred, wasteful bureaucracy cut, and employee participation encouraged. As one long time GM executive said, “It was 180 degrees different from everything I had ever done in my career.” As a result, production soared, defects plummeted, and labor problems all but disappeared.
All this was too much for the GM brass back in Detroit, however, whose mindset was described by the great auto analyst Maryann Keller as follows: “Control hourly workers so they can’t control the company, and replace them with machines whenever possible.” Executives soon discovered that the way to curry favor with CEO Roger Smith was to badmouth NUMMI and work to help him recentralize control.
And now here we are 20 difficult years later, with executives in Detroit again moving as fast as they can to undermine a goose struggling to lay a golden egg. Because it is profitable, the Wuling Sunshine car discredits GM’s continuing commitment to automation, high performance vehicles, and tight worker control. Just before Murtaugh left, according to the New York Times, GM moved a group of executives from Singapore so they could more tightly supervise the Chinese operations and bring them into line with the kind of operating procedures that prevail in Detroit. We all know where those practices (along with the cowardice of executives who refuse to question the American commitment to unsustainable forms of health insurance) have landed the company whose fortunes were once assumed to parallel our own.