There’s a saying that when goods cross borders, armies don’t (it’s the correlative to the observation attributed to Bastiat: “If goods cannot cross borders, armies will.”). The point is that trade tends to bring people together who might otherwise have cause to be hostile. One of the themes at Acton University, which begins in just a few hours, is globalization and various Christian responses. That’s sure to be the case again this year, as we have just about 70 countries represented among the various participants.
It’s within this context that I want to pass along a noteworthy story I heard yesterday on our statewide public radio station, Michigan Radio. It focuses on what automaker General Motors did when faced with parts shortages following the Fukushima earthquake.
GM added a local Japan-based “War Room” to its response, focusing on solving problems on the ground to get the supply-chain back up and running. As Tracy Samilton reports, “Once the suppliers became convinced GM wasn’t there to dump them, they were awfully happy for their customer’s help. Whatever GM could do, it did. One supplier ran out of a special form of hydrogen peroxide. GM found another source for it and shipped it in from Korea. The company hired trucks.”
So when you have companies with global reach across borders and global supply chains to match, you get a different kind of “War Room,” those focused on putting “the links of the Japanese supply chain back together, often just in time to keep an assembly line from shutting down.”
As Samilton summarizes the lessons of the parts crisis, “People involved in the effort say they grew as human beings, grew closer to each other, met people in the company they might never have known. It was tough. But War Room veterans are keen to point out that they’re not the heroes of this story.”
Ron Mills, head of engineering at GM’s Tech Center, puts it this way,
“We all worked really hard here, but at the end of the day, I did go home, right? And I ate well, and people in Japan could not do that. They had to work hard and also go back and try to find food and clothing and shelter for them and their families and which – I was just in awe of how hard and how they were able to endure.”
The GM workers were driven both by a sense of self-preservation and need as well as genuine concern for their Japanese partners, a concern that became more concrete and palpable as the invisible hands up the supply chain became increasingly visible.