Engines of Democracy

The snazziest thing about GE's Durham facility is the look of the jet engines themselves. Hanging from an overhead hoist, a CF6 engine has the allure of a big toy. You can't help wondering where the "on" switch is. The nose cone in front has a white spiral on it that looks very familiar: Riding on an airplane, you've twisted your head around, looked out the window, and seen the black nose cone with its white hieroglyph. (The white design functions as a safety mechanism, revealing to the ground crew whether or not the engine is spinning.) The sides of the engine look like a schematic of vessels, cables, and pipes. All of the parts and textures beckon the touch--yet the care required to build these engines makes it seem like even touching them in the wrong place could cause disaster.

At GE/Durham, the jets are not just the main stage show--they are the only act. And the stage set is nothing special. The building is a former steam-generator plant, with corrugated metal walls and concrete floors that are 18 inches thick. Each of the two main assembly buildigns has 3.5 acres of floor space. Building 1 is open 6 stories high; Building 2 is open 11 stories high. They are cavernous enough to have their own weather. The pinkish mercury-vapor lighting gives the factory floor an odd, underwater feel.

There is no well-equipped gym. Thre are no offices--corner, nice, or otherwise. There are no windows. There are no well-stocked break rooms, Ping-Pong tables, or video games to provide relief from stress. The cafeteria is a small room where a couple of sweet ladies prepare food that's reminiscent of the kind you would get in an elementary-school lunchroom. The service is outsourced, the meals are cheap, and the food is served in Styrofoam containers. There are no stock options for technicians. The only way to get a promotion is to do the studying and training necessary to score well enough on an exam to become a tech-2 or a tech-3.

And yet, the external turnover rate at GE/Durham is less than 5% per year. (The plant loses between 10% and 15% of its staff each year to other GE facilities.) At a place where the morale is high and the performance is extraordinary, something is going on that is often overlooked in an economy obsessed with fringe benefits, gratuitious flattery, and today's closing stock price. At GE/Durham, the work itself is the thing.

The techs at GE/Durham have challenging jobs that matter, they have a degree of control over their work that is almost unprecedented, they adhere to demanding performance standards, they receive the training and support that they need to do the best work they can--and, as a result, they do just that. There is somethng so extraordinary about this place that you wish you could walk through it with Karl Marx and Max Weber--just to hear them explain how its revolutionary culture squares with their theories about the dehumanization of work in modern society.

How good is GE/Durham? Since Paula Sims arrived in 1995, when the plant was two years old, GE/Durham has reduced the number of defects per engine delivered to Boeing by 75%. The defect rate used to be about one defect per engine (and remember, such defects are mostly cosmetic). Today, defects occur at the rate of one for every fourth engine. And GE/Durham considers even that rate to be too high. The plant still holds a weekly conference call with Beoing to discuss defects on the latest delivery--as well as techniques for eliminating future defects.

The plant has not missed a delivery date on the CF6 engine in 38 straight months. Or, to put it another way, GE/Durham has consecutively delivered more than 500 CF6 engines on schedule. (The GE90, a brand-new engine, doesn't have such a fine record. Th GE90 teams are only in their fifth straight month of one-time deliveries.) The cost of producing jet engines dropped by 10% or more every single year of Paula Sim's tenure at GE/Durham. Today, manufacturing a GE90 costs less than half of what it did in 1995. Given that the GE90 is a never-before-made engine, initial savings were to be expected still, the degree of savings was remarkably high. What is even more revealing, GE/Durham has reduced the cost of producing the CF6--an engine in production for two decadwes--by 30% since 1995. "We are very close to producing twice the output of CF6s from this plant with the same number of employees as when I came here," says Sims.

Although comparisons between GE plants are difficult--no two plants do exactly the same kind of work, with exactly the same kind of overhead to support it--Bob McEwan, who has authority over GE/Durham says simply, "They are the best in the GE Aircraft Engines division."

The most interesting measure may be one that the people at GE/Durham talk about themselves. They don't really think that their main job it so make jet engines. They think that their main job is to make jet engines better.