Any worker on the line can stop the whole factory
Toyota built a cord any assembly worker could pull to halt production — and made that the opposite of a firing offense.
On a traditional assembly line, stopping production is the one thing a line worker is never supposed to do. Toyota built the opposite rule into its factories: a cord or button running the length of every station, and an explicit instruction that anyone who spots a defect should pull it.
The system is called andon — Japanese for the paper lanterns once used as signal lights — and it looks, on paper, like an invitation to chaos. Hand thousands of people the power to halt a multi-billion-dollar operation and some of them, surely, will abuse it or panic-pull over nothing.
That's not what happened. What Toyota discovered is that the cord is rarely used to stop the line for long; most pulls trigger a quick fix at the station within the allotted cycle time, and production resumes before it ever reaches the next stage. The value isn't the stoppage. It's that the option to stop is always live, which means small defects get named the moment they appear instead of getting built into ten thousand cars and discovered in a recall.
Most management hierarchies do the reverse: they concentrate the authority to halt work at the top, where the people least likely to notice a problem early sit. Toyota put the stop button in the hands of whoever was closest to the flaw, and treated silence — not the pull — as the failure worth punishing.