This is rather like my observation about British car companies in the late 20th century:

- large factory of British workers + British management: strife, strikes, disaster, bankruptcy (British Leyland)

- small factory of British workers + British management: success, on a small scale (lots of the F1 industry, McLaren etc; also true of non-car manufacturing)

- large factory of British workers with overseas management: success (Nissan Sunderland, BMW era Mini, etc)

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trevvr 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Where does someone like Rover fit in to your matrix? If I can respectfully recommend. If you can go have a read of "We sell our time no more" by Paul Stewart.

Tory governance and fiscal policies had all the responsibility for Leyland, Hillman and more importantly Rover.

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pjc50 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I have to admit it's not that deeply researched. That book sounds interesting.

For Rover in particular, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Venture_Holdings stands out. Similar to Maplin and Toys R Us, an example of the owner-management taking a large amount of cash out of a business that was declining.

	▲	regularfry 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What's particularly interesting here is that one of the success cases (BMW era Mini) was built on a Rover design. They picked it up and ran with it - basically gutted the electrics and power-train to match their existing systems and supply chains - but it was already in flight when BMW came on. That factory was fascinating to work in, looking back on it I saw a lot of Deming-compatible stuff going on that I wasn't equipped to recognise at the time. There was strong German representation in factory management, lots of interaction with people coming and going from Munich all the time. But the production line staff had a large agency contingent so it didn't have the "job for life" ethos that the Toyota Way would say is essential.