mordant wit

The factory is not just quiet -- it seems almost deserted. The driveway, lined with thick pine forest, is a mile long and gives the place a muffled quality. The two main buildings are large enough to be airplane hangars -- tall-shouldered, with blank metal walls so high that the doorways look puny. The inside of the far building is almost as still as the outside. There is plenty of equipment -- tool carts, platforms for working around large items, racks of parts. But there is an air of work interrupted. Only a handful of people are visible.

It is, however, instantly clear what kind of work gets done here. Hanging from yellow overhead cranes are two of the largest jet engines in the world. It takes no great aeronautical expertise to appreciate these engines: Even unfinished, they look muscular. They're also huge: Each one is bigger than a Lincoln Navigator.

Although engines go out the door of this plant at a rate of more than one per day, the air of calm is hardly its most unusual aspect. The plant is General Electric's aircraft-engine assembly facility in Durham, North Carolina. Even within Jack Welch's widely admired empire, the Durham facility is in its own league -- a quiet corner of a global giant, a place where the radical has become routine. GE/Durham has more than 170 employees but just one boss: the plant manager. Everyone in the place reports to her. Which means that on a day-to-day basis, the people who work here have no boss. They essentially run themselves.