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To be sure, automaking has become such a globalized business that the nationality of cars is increasingly blurred. GM owns 38% of Japan's Isuzu, 50% of South Korea's Daewoo Motors, 50% of Sweden's Saab-Scania and 5% of Japan's Suzuki, and shares some manufacturing operations with both Toyota and Suzuki. Those alliances give GM global reach, but the automaker was in danger of evolving into little more than a holding company if it did not relearn how to manufacture competitive cars in its own plants.
Saturn's best hope is that it represents a profound change in the way GM manages its people. But the difference is not technological. Saturn's cavernous, mile-long Tennessee factory is a medium-tech plant, as are many of the most efficient facilities in Japan. The core of Saturn's system is one of the most radical labor-management agreements ever developed in this country, one that involves the United Auto Workers in every aspect of the business. The executive suite in Spring Hill is shared by president LeFauve and U.A.W. coordinator Richard Hoalcraft, who often travel together and conduct much of the company's business in each other's presence. .
Beyond sharing power at top levels, the labor agreement established some 165 work teams, which have been given more power than assembly-line workers anywhere else in GM or at any Japanese plant. They are allowed to interview and approve new hires for their teams (average size: 10 workers). They are given wide responsibility to decide how to run their own areas; when workers see a problem on the assembly line, they can pull on a blue handle and shut down the entire line. They are even given budget responsibility. One team in Saturn's final-assembly area voted to reject some proposed pneumatic car- assembly equipment and went to another supplier to buy electronic gear that its members believed to be safer. Says Hoalcraft: "I don't know of another U.A.W. person who has ever decided on the purchase and installation of equipment."
Not all of Saturn's progressive ideas sprang up in Tennessee. Many were borrowed from around the world by the Group of 99, a team of Saturn workers who traveled 2 million miles in 1984 and looked into some 160 pioneering enterprises, including Hewlett-Packard, McDonald's, Volvo, Kawasaki and Nissan. Their main conclusions: that most successful companies provide employees with a sense of ownership, have few and flexible guidelines and impose virtually no job-defining shop rules.
From that blueprint grew the most radical twist in Saturn's labor agreement, one that is even more democratic than the Japanese model: the provision for consensus decision making. The Saturn philosophy is that all teams must be committed to decisions affecting them before those changes are put into place, from choosing an ad agency to selecting an outside supplier. "That means a lot of yelling sometimes, and everything takes a lot longer," says U.A.W. official Jack O'Toole, who oversees Spring Hill personnel, "but once they come out of that meeting room, they're 100% committed."