Question: How do Somalian pirates differ from some Wall Street CEOs?

Answer: A Somalian pirate takes hostages and demands money. A Wall Street CEO takes money and demands hostages.

Without the need, drive, pursuit, and focus on reducing waste; and because we had $1 billion to spend, Saturn had already lost one of the key battles against our rival, Toyota. And spend we did…

Expensive band-aids

GM, like so many other companies back then (and, of course, many today), wasn’t very good at performing root cause analysis (RCA). When RCA isn’t properly done, the company has to do something to catch the problem or defect and prevent it from getting to the customer. The norm is to add multitudes of band-aids, including inspection, inventory, and extra processing. This is exactly why lean is so popular today—we have accumulated so many band-aids over the years because we didn’t do a good RCA. (For more on RCA, see my previous column, “Why Root Cause Analysis Sucks in the United States”)

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