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While it don’t think it was ever applied to GM as a whole, the NUMMI plant in Fremont was able to use many of the Toyota principles when it was run as joint GM-Toyota venture, using UAW workers. The tragedy was that GM executives didn’t understand or care about transferring lessons learned there to other parts of the organization, until it was too late.

Of course, you can’t minimize the different financial environments Japan and US have for manufacturers...