Employing superb storytelling skills, Ingrassia explains in head-shaking detail the elements of a wholly avoidable collision.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist's pedal-to-the-metal history of America's signature industry.
In the mid 1920s, Henry Ford, mass production's inventor, outsold all competitors combined. General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan pioneered mass marketing—“a car for every purse and purpose”—and hired the auto industry's first design staff. Walter Chrysler was Time Man of the Year in 1928. By 2009 both GM and Chrysler had entered bankruptcy and Ford only barely escaped. American car companies had sunk to a state best summarized by The Economist headline, “Detroitosaurus Wrecks.” Former Wall Street Journal Detroit bureau chief Ingrassia (co-author: Comeback: The Fall & Rise of the American Automobile Industry, 1994) conducts a brilliant industry autopsy, tracing the decline to the ’70s—though Ralph Nader exposed Detroit's shoddy products as early 1965—when the combination of complacent, arrogant management, increasingly mindless union militancy and surprisingly nimble foreign competition began to threaten America's worldwide leadership. Though the Big Three mounted a comeback of sorts during the ’80s and ’90s, the industry soon fell back into the bad habits that led to the current meltdown. A delightful mix of history and first-person reporting, Ingrassia's narrative covers numerous historic episodes, including the United Auto Workers' storied Battle of the Overpass, the introduction of the Corvette and the Thunderbird, the birth of Volkswagen and the rise of Toyota, the Ford Pinto that exploded and the Edsel that laid an egg, GM's failed Saturn experiment, the doomed DaimlerChrysler marriage and the government's bailout negotiations with GM and Chrysler. The tales of bit players like the South Paris, Maine, Chrysler dealer Gene Benner and the father-son UAW members Fred and Gene Young of Belvidere, Ill., are effectively set against the machinations of management big shots like Billy Durant, Lee Iacocca and Richard Wagoner and labor honchos Walter Reuther, Leonard Woodcock and Stephen Yokich.
Employing superb storytelling skills, Ingrassia explains in head-shaking detail the elements of a wholly avoidable collision.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6863-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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