As regular readers are well aware one of my interests is noting commentaries on the current culture and cultural indicators and “overlaying” that on the church to see what that means for our ecclesiology.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Theology After Google conference at the Claremont School of Theology.  This conference, organized by Philip Clayton and Tripp Fuller, has drawn a bit of controversy for its emphasis on “progressive” and “emergent” theology.  Yes, that was clearly there but my interest was on the technology and the concept of “returning theological discussion to the people,” which in my view is “platform independent” and need not be automatically associated with a theological viewpoint.  Anyway, more on that another time.

But in the spirit of this concept of taking culture and holding it up against the Church I heard some fascinating bits on the radio program “This American Life” last Saturday (3/27). The program was about NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated), a joint Toyota/GM venture in Fremont, California, which began in 1984.  GM pulled out of the venture in 2009 when it filed for bankruptcy and now Toyota is ending its part of the project with the last vehicle, a Corolla, rolling off the assembly line today (Today’s NPR story).  And there is a Presbyterian connection to this story:  The Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and pastor of Mission Bay Community Church in San Francisco was the religious representative on a California state commission that issued a report regarding the shut down and traveled to Japan to call attention to the closure and meet with Toyota officials.

The piece is interesting and tells the story with the voices of those at the center of the rise of the plant and the attempts to reproduce it elsewhere.  Here are some quotes from the story.  As you read them instead of thinking about a commercial enterprize or a manufacturing plant, substitute the mainline church in there:

“Why hasn’t GM got it yet?  It’s not like this reliability problem snuck up on them — It’s been fifty years since it started losing market share.  Fifty years since it began the slide from holding over half the U.S. car market in the 1960’s to just 22% today.”  (Ira Glass, program host)

“I think there was pride (pause) and defensiveness. ‘I’m proud because I’m the biggest auto maker in the world. I’ve been the best, I’ve dominated the market.  You can’t teach me anything you little Japanese company.’ ” (Jeffrey Liker, author of The Toyota Way, talking about why GM senior management was not completely accepting of the fact that Toyota was building better quality cars in the early 80’s.)

“The key to the Toyota production system was a principle so basic it sounds like an empty management slogan — ‘Team work.’  Back home in Fremont GM supervisors ordered around large groups of workers.  At the [Japanese] plant people were divided into teams of just four or five, switched jobs every few hours to relieve the monotony.  And a team leader would step in to help whenever anything went wrong.” (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“There were too many people convinced that they didn’t need to have to change. (reporter asks why?) It’s not logical. They just didn’t.” (Larry Spiegel, GM mid-level management who tried to help implement the NUMMI model at another GM plant.)

“This was one of the biggest differences between Fremont and Van Nuys — Van Nuys hadn’t been shut down.  It turns out it’s a lot easier to get workers to change if they’ve lost their jobs and then you offer them back.  Without that many union members just saw the Toyota system as a threat.”  (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“At Van Nuys it wasn’t just union members that resisted the Japanese system. Managers didn’t like it either — they had their own privileges to protect…. Their bonuses depended on the number of cars that rolled off [the assembly line], never mind how many defects they had.” (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“Workers could only build cars as good as the parts they were given.  At NUMMI many of the parts came from Japan and were really good.  At Van Nuys it was totally different.” (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“You had asked the question earlier ‘what’s different when you walk into the NUMMI plant?’ Well you can see a lot of things different, but the one thing you don’t see is the system that supports the NUMMI plant.” (Ernie Schaefer, Van Nuys plant manager)

“[Toyota] never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of the key people.  I’ve often puzzled over that, why they did that.  And I think they recognized is that we were asking all the wrong questions.  We didn’t understand the bigger picture thing.  All of our questions were focused on the floor of the assembly plant, what’s happening on the line.  That’s not the real issue.  The real issue is ‘How do you support that system with all the other functions that take place in the organization?’ ” (Ernie Schaefer, Van Nuys plant manager)

“One reason car execs were in denial was Detroit’s insular culture… [E]veryone had settled into comfortable roles in this dysfunctional system and learned to live with it.  And in the late 1980’s, with their market share in free fall, Jeffrey Liker says they were more apt to blame others than themselves.”  (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“Jeffrey Liker says the cultural gap between NUMMI and the rest of GM was so vast that even with clear marching orders to change some of the people running the company didn’t know where to begin.”  (Frank Langfitt, reporter)

“We had some tough goes in some of our facilities where we spent more time trying to convince the plant leadership versus going on and actually doing the implementation.  I was actually asked in one plant to leave because they were not interested in what I had to sell.” (Goeff Weller, GM manager in charge of converting plants to the Japanese system)

This is not to advocate for change for changes sake, or to say that implicitly “new is better.”  It is interesting to consider how we do things, how the organization – be it the congregation, presbytery, synod, or national level – can change and support other changes that are happening.  How do we work together – top down or bottom up?  Is our measure of success quality or quantity?  Do we view ourselves as “too big to fail?”  I love the quote about it being easier to get people to agree to change if the institution has been shut down and their are trying to begin again differently.

There is a lot to think about in there.  And this piece did get the attention of another Presbyterian commentator – Jan Edmiston at A Church for Starving Artists.