Rust Smith

My wife's brother spent six years at a Japanese car plant in Kentucky. He was sent to teach the Americans our way of working. He came home with a notebook. On the cover, in Japanese: "Things I Learned Instead." Some pages: "The first day of deer season, half the line takes vacation. HR plans for it every year. Nobody pretends to be sick. They just say 'deer season.'" "They name the machines. The welding robot on Line 2 is Darlene. Darlene gets a birthday cake." "When someone's wife has a baby, the whole line signs a card. The card is bigger than the baby." "A man with thirty years on the line showed me a better way to do my own job. Then he said, 'Don't tell your boss I told you that, boss.'" "Every Friday, someone brings doughnuts. Nobody is assigned. Somebody always does." "They thank the janitor by name. Every day. His name is Curtis." The last page is from his final day. In our system, anyone can stop the line, but only for a problem. Stopping it is serious. "On my last day, the line stopped for one minute. There was no problem. They stopped it to shake my hand." He says it's the only time in six years he was happy to see the line stop.