Why American Used Three Separate Bolts?
The Whole Is Bigger Than The Sum of Its Parts.
American cars used to be the top ranking cars until 1960 when the Japanese penetrated the American geography. Besides great quality, the Japanese cars were cheaper than the American ones.
Once a manager from a Detroit automobile firm narrated of stripping down a Japanese model to understand how Japanese produced such reliability with extraordinary precision at a lower cost on a particular assembly process.
Surprisingly he said, the same standard type of bolt was used three times on the engine block, each time to mount a different type of component. American cars, on the other hand, used three different types of bolts to mount three different types of components using three different wrenches, and three different types of inventories of bolts-making the production slower and more costlier.
The biggest question now is why did the Americans use three separate bolts?
The design company in Detroit had three different groups of engineers, each responsible for “their component only.” The Japanese had only one to design the entire engine mounting, and may be more, the manager said.
The irony was that each group of American engineers considered their job successful and satisfactory as their bolts and assembly worked just fine.
Key Insights:
- We must focus on integration than isolation.
- Fixing issues in isolation may not bear fruitful results as you’d expect them to.
- We learn best from experiences, but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions.