“Joe, please pull the cord.”
Joe had never pulled an andon cord. No one in his area had. Since the plant had opened, there had been only a few cord pulls, and one of those had been an accident.
“Sir, I can fix this,” Joe said, working furiously to pop the taillight into place.
Joe’s team leader was standing nearby. That man’s manager had been shadowing Toyoda as he walked through the factory, so he was orbiting nearby as well. When Joe glanced up, he saw a half dozen of the plant’s most senior executives staring back.
“Joe, please,” Toyoda said. Then he stepped over, took Joe’s hand in his own and guided it to the andon cord, and together they pulled. A flashing light began spinning. When the chassis reached the end of Joe’s station without the taillight correctly in place, the line stopped moving. Joe was shaking so much, he had to hold his crowbar with both hands. He finally got the taillight positioned and, with a terrified glance at his bosses, reached up and pulled the andon cord, restarting the line.
Toyoda faced Joe and bowed. He began speaking in Japanese.
“Joe, please forgive me,” a lieutenant translated. “I have done a poor job of instructing your managers of the importance of helping you pull the cord when there is a problem. You are the most important part of this plant. Only you can make every car great. I promise I will do everything in my power to never fail you again.”
By lunchtime, everyone inside the factory had heard the story. The next day, andon cords were pulled more than a dozen times. The next week, more than two dozen times. A month later, the plant was averaging nearly a hundred pulls a day.
The importance of the andon cords and the employee suggestions and Toyoda’s apology was that they demonstrated that the fate of the company was in the employees’ hands. “There was a genuine devotion to convincing employees they were part of a family,” said Joel Smith, the UAW representative at NUMMI. “It had to be reinforced constantly, but it was real. We might have disagreements or see things differently, but at the end of the day, we were committed to each other’s success.”
“If people started pulling andons for no good reason, the plant would have fallen apart,” said Smith. Everyone knew it still cost thousands of dollars each minute a line was stopped, “and that anyone could stop the line, at any time, without penalty. So employees could bankrupt the place if they wanted to.
“Once you’re entrusted with that kind of authority, you can’t help feel a sense of responsibility,” said Smith. “The most junior workers didn’t want NUMMI to go bankrupt, and the management didn’t want that, and so, suddenly, everyone was on the same side of the table.” And as workers were empowered to make more choices, their motivation skyrocketed. Just as Mauricio Delgado and the U.S. Marine Corps had found in other settings, when workers felt a greater sense of control, their drive expanded.
Word of the NUMMI experiment spread quickly. When professors from Harvard Business School visited a few years after the plant reopened, they found that former GM employees who once spent only forty-five seconds of every minute working now averaged fifty-seven seconds of labor per minute. By 1986, “NUMMI’s productivity was higher than that of any other GM facility and more than twice that of its predecessor, GM-Fremont,” they wrote. Absenteeism had dropped from 25 percent during the GM days to 3 percent under NUMMI. There were no observable levels of substance abuse, prostitution, or sabotage. The formal grievance system was hardly ever used. NUMMI’s productivity was as high as that of plants in Japan, “even though its workers were, on average, ten years older and much less experienced with the Toyota production system,” the Harvard researchers wrote. In 1985, Car and Driver magazine printed an issue with the cover line “Hell Freezes Over,” announcing NUMMI’s accomplishments. The worst auto factory on earth had become one of the most productive plants in existence, using the same workers as before.
Then, four years after NUMMI opened, the recession hit the auto industry. The stock market crashed. Unemployment was rising. Car sales plummeted. NUMMI’s managers estimated they needed to reduce production by 40 percent. “Everyone was saying there were going to be layoffs,” said Smith, the UAW rep. Instead, the plant’s top sixty-five executives all took pay cuts. Assembly line workers were reassigned to janitorial duties or landscaping, or sent into the paint room to scrape air vents instead of let go. The company proved it was committed.
“After that, workers were willing to do anything for the company,” Smith said. “Four separate sales slumps over thirty years, and NUMMI never did layoffs once. And each time, when the business finally came back, everyone worked harder than before.”
Rick Madrid retired from NUMMI in 1992, after almost four decades of building cars. Three years later, the Smithsonian mounted an exhibit at the National Museum of American History that included Madrid’s ID badge and his hat in a show named A Palace of Progress. NUMMI, the curators wrote, was iconic, a factory that had demonstrated it was possible to unite workers and managers around a common cause through mutual commitment and shared power.
Even now NUMMI is cited inside business schools and by corporate chieftains as an example of what organizations can achieve when a commitment culture takes hold. Since NUMMI was founded, the “lean manufacturing” principles have infiltrated nearly every corner of American commerce, from Silicon Valley to Hollywood to healthcare. “I’m really glad I ended up my years as an autoworker at NUMMI,” Madrid said. “I went from being depressed, bored, people didn’t even know I existed, to seeing J. D. Power name NUMMI as a top quality plant.”
NUMMI’s workers got together for a party after that J. D. Power announcement. “And when I spoke, I said, we’re the best damn autoworkers in the world,” said Madrid. “Not just the workers. Not just the managers. All of us, together, are the best, because we’re devoted to each other.”
III.
Six years before Frank Janssen was kidnapped, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had reached out to a thirty-four-year-old Wall Street executive to see if he would be interested in overseeing development of the bureau’s technology systems. Chad Fulgham had never worked in law enforcement before. His specialty was developing large computer networks for investment banks such as Lehman Brothers and JPMorgan Chase. So he was surprised when he received a call in 2008 explaining that the FBI wanted an interview.
Improving the bureau’s technology had long been a priority for federal officials. As early as 1997, the FBI’s top leaders had promised Congress they would deliver an overhauled system that tied together the dozens of internal databases and analytical engines the bureau maintained. This network, officials said, would give agents powerful new tools for connecting the dots among disparate cases. But by the time the bureau contacted Fulgham eleven years later, work on that system, Sentinel, had already consumed $305 million with no end in sight. The agency had brought in an outside group to figure out why Sentinel was taking so long. The experts said the bureau was so bogged down by bureaucracy and conflicting agendas that it would take tens of millions of dollars simply to get the program back on track.
The bureau called Fulgham to see if he could find a cheaper way to get things moving again. “I secretly always wanted to work for the FBI or the CIA,” he told me. “So when they called me, particularly with this huge, hairy problem, it was like getting offered my dream job.”
First, though, Fulgham needed to convince the bureau that his approach was the right one. Fulgham’s management style, he explained, drew its inspiration from examples like NUMMI. In the previous two decades, as NUMMI’s success had become better known, executives in other industries had started adapting the Toyota Production System philosophy to other industries. In 2001, a group of computer programmers had gathered at a ski lodge in Utah to write a set of principles, called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development,” that adapted Toyota’s methods and lean manufacturing to how software was created. The Agile methodology, as it came to be known, emphasized collaboration, frequent testing, rapid i
teration, and pushing decision making to whoever was closest to a problem. It quickly revolutionized software development and now is the standard methodology among many tech firms.
Among filmmakers, the “Pixar method” was modeled specifically on Toyota’s management techniques and became famous for empowering low-level animators to make critical choices. When Pixar’s leadership was asked to take over Disney Animation in 2008, executives introduced themselves with what became known as “the Toyota Speech,” “in which I described the car company’s commitment to empowering its employees and letting people on the assembly line make decisions when they encountered problems,” Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull later wrote. “I stressed that no one at Disney needed to wait for permission to come up with solutions. What is the point of hiring smart people, we asked, if you don’t empower them to fix what’s broken?”
In hospitals, the distribution of authority to nurses and others who are not physicians is referred to as “lean healthcare.” It is a management philosophy and a “culture in which anyone can, and indeed must, ‘stop the line,’ or stop the care process if they feel something is not right,” the chairman of one lean hospital, the Virginia Mason Medical Center, wrote in 2005.
These approaches emerged in different industries, but they and other adaptations of lean manufacturing shared key attributes. Each was dedicated to devolving decision making to the person closest to a problem. They all encouraged collaboration by allowing teams to self-manage and self-organize. They emphatically insisted on a culture of commitment and trust.
Fulgham argued that the FBI’s technology efforts could succeed only if the bureau embraced a similar approach. FBI officials had to commit to distributing critical decision-making power to people on the ground, he said, such as lowly software engineers or junior field agents. This approach was a significant shift because previously, bureau executives—distrustful of one another and consumed by internal power struggles—had designed new technology systems by first outlining thousands of specifications each piece of software needed to satisfy. Committees filled hundreds of pages with rules for how databases ought to function. Any major change required approvals from numerous officials. The system was so dysfunctional that software development teams would sometimes spend months building a program, only to be told it was canceled when they were done. And the results were often dysfunctional as well. When Fulgham asked for a demonstration of the Sentinel work done thus far, for instance, an engineer led him to a computer monitor and invited him to input some keywords, such as a criminal’s alias and an address associated with a crime.
“In fifteen minutes, we’ll have a report of previous cases linked to that address and name,” the engineer said.
“The people I’m going to report to carry guns, and you want me to tell them it will take the computer fifteen minutes to provide help?” said Fulgham.
A 2010 inspector general’s report had said it would take another six years and $396 million to get Sentinel working. Fulgham told the bureau’s director that if they gave him the authority to distribute control, he would cut the number of people needed from more than four hundred to just thirty employees and deliver Sentinel for $20 million in a bit over a year. Soon Fulgham and a team of software engineers and FBI agents were holed up in the basement of the bureau’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. The only rules, Fulgham told them, were that everyone had to make suggestions, anyone could declare a time-out if they thought a project was moving in the wrong direction, and the person closest to a problem had primary responsibility for figuring out how to solve it.
The main problem with Sentinel, Fulgham believed, was that the bureau—like many big organizations—had tried to plan everything in advance. But creating great software requires flexibility. Problems pop up unexpectedly and breakthroughs are unpredictable. The truth was, no one knew exactly how FBI agents would use Sentinel once it was functional, or how it would need to change as crime-fighting techniques evolved. So instead of meticulously predesigning each interface and system—instead of trying to control from above—they needed to make Sentinel into a tool that could adapt to agents’ needs. And the only way to do that, Fulgham was convinced, was if developers were unfettered themselves.
Fulgham’s team started by coming up with more than one thousand scenarios in which Sentinel could be useful, everything from inputting victims’ statements to tracking evidence to interfacing with FBI databases that looked for patterns among clues. Then they started working backward to figure out what kind of software should accommodate each need. Every morning, the team conducted a “stand-up”—meetings where everyone stood to encourage brevity—and recounted the previous day’s work and what they hoped to accomplish over the next twenty-four hours. Whoever was closest to a particular problem or a piece of code was considered the expert on that topic, but any programmer or agent, no matter their rank, was free to make suggestions. In one case, a programmer and a field agent, after brainstorming, suggested that they model part of Sentinel on TurboTax, the popular financial software that reduced thousands of pages of complicated tax laws into a series of basic questions. “The idea was basically ‘Investigations and Justice for Dummies,’ ” said Fulgham. “It was absolutely brilliant.”
Under the old system, getting approval for that proposal would have taken upward of six months and required dozens of memos, each carefully scrubbed of any mention of TurboTax or any indications that programmers intended to simplify federal procedures. No one would have wanted an enterprising lawyer or journalist getting their hands on something that used plain English to explain how the system worked. Under Fulgham, though, none of that bureaucracy existed. The programmer and agent mentioned the idea on a Monday, had a prototype ready by Wednesday, and everyone agreed to use the approach going forward on Friday. “It was like government on steroids,” Fulgham said.
Every two weeks, the team demonstrated their work for a broad audience of high-ranking officials who provided feedback. The bureau’s director had forbidden anyone from micromanaging or making demands. At most, division heads could offer suggestions, each of which was cataloged and evaluated by whoever was closest to that piece of code. Gradually, the Sentinel team became bolder and more ambitious, not just building systems for record keeping, but linking Sentinel to tools that identified trends and threats and made comparisons among cases. By the time they were done, Sentinel was at the core of a system so powerful it could look across millions of investigations simultaneously and pick out patterns agents had missed. The software went live sixteen months after Fulgham took over. “Deployment of the Sentinel application in July 2012 represented a pivotal moment for the FBI,” the agency later wrote. Sentinel, in its first month alone, was used by more than thirty thousand agents. Since then, it has been credited with helping solve thousands of crimes.
At NUMMI, decentralizing decision making helped inspire a workforce. At the FBI, it played a different role. Lean management and agile methods helped fuel the ambitions and innovation of junior programmers who had been beaten down by bureaucracy. It emboldened them to come up with solutions no one had considered before. It convinced people to swing for the fences because they knew they wouldn’t be punished if they missed the ball now and then.
“The effect of Sentinel on the FBI has been dramatic,” wrote Jeff Sutherland, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, in a study of Sentinel’s development published in 2014. “The ability to communicate and share information has fundamentally changed what the bureau is capable of.”
More important, the way that Sentinel succeeded served as a source of inspiration to the agency and its leadership. “The Sentinel experience taught us a lot about how much potential can be unlocked when you give people more authority,” Jeff Johnson, the bureau’s current chief technology officer, told me. “We saw how much more passionate people can become. You look at some of our recent cases—the kidnapping in North Carolina, hostage rescue situations, terrorism investigations—and in situations like that, we’v
e learned it’s critical that agents feel like they can make independent decisions.
“But empowering people in an agency this size is really hard,” Johnson said. “That was one of the problems before 9/11—people didn’t feel rewarded for independent thinking. Then you look at things like the development of Sentinel, and you see how much is possible.”
IV.
After the agents working on the Frank Janssen kidnapping case inputted the data they had collected into Sentinel, the software and the databases connected to it began looking for patterns and leads. The agents had entered the cellphone numbers the bureau had collected, the addresses investigators had visited, and the aliases the kidnappers had used in intercepted calls. Others inputted the names of people who had visited Kelvin Melton in prison, license plates caught on cameras around Janssen’s home, and credit card transactions from inside the stores where the burner phones were bought. Every detail was fed into Sentinel in the hopes a connection would emerge.
Eventually, the agency’s databases discovered a coincidence: The phone that had sent photos of Frank Janssen to his wife had also made a call to Austell, Georgia, a small city outside Atlanta. The FBI’s computers had looked through millions of records from other cases, and had found a link to Austell from another case.
In March 2013, a year earlier, a confidential informant had given the bureau the address of an apartment in Austell that he said criminals used as a safe house. That same informant, in a different conversation, had also mentioned an imprisoned gang leader who had “put a hit on the female District Attorney who prosecuted him,” a reference the FBI believed was to Kelvin Melton, the man who allegedly planned the Janssen kidnapping.
At the time of those conversations, no one inside the FBI knew what the informant was talking about. Janssen wouldn’t be kidnapped until a year later. And since then, no one had given the conversation a second thought. The agents who had interviewed the informant weren’t even part of the team looking for Janssen.
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