Folksy, and too humble by half: Israel-Curley was a rare bird, and it paid off handsomely. (128 b&w photographs)
The history of Judy’s, the young women’s clothing chain, along with tried-and-true business advice, from the force behind the operation.
From its start as a storefront in East Los Angeles in 1948 to its current superstore status, encompassing 104 stores, Judy’s was the inspiration of Israel-Curley, who set the tone and guided the business for 42 years, until she sold it in 1989. It was nearly unheard of for a woman to be running an expanding business in the 1950s, but Israel-Curley was successful by dint of her intuitive business sense—she welcomed her employees into an extended family, treated them fairly, offered them advancement, had impeccable timing for big moves, and worked like a dog (juggling family and work throughout)—not to mention that she had a flair for innovation. She is the first to say that the eye of the customer dictates fashion, yet it was her fashion sense that resulted in shortening sweater sleeves, introducing a certain pink, and bringing jeans and Keds to the fore. In a style that thrums with the obvious energy she brought to her work, she explains her guiding principles: that the aim is to sell a great product at good value; that fear is incompatible with creativity and ambition (but that worrying keeps you attentive to details); that the product comes first, then the location; that it’s not location location location, but customer customer customer. (“Be attentive to your customer and never help another at the same time without the consent of the first.”) She is frank about her unhappiness with unions: she feels she treats her employees better than a union would, and is, admittedly, a control freak; then again, she was one of the first to hire African-American saleswomen. Her chapter on rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous can be disregarded entirely.
Folksy, and too humble by half: Israel-Curley was a rare bird, and it paid off handsomely. (128 b&w photographs)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2002
ISBN: 1-58567-307-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
An informative if overlong account of how American car makers regained much of the ground they had lost during the 1980s to foreign rivals in their own backyard and Europe. Drawing mainly on their own reportage as Detroit-based correspondents for The Wall Street Journal, Ingrassia and White offer a lively series of set pieces illustrating how Motown's Big Three (Chrysler, Ford, General Motors) managed to avert envelopment by their Japanese counterparts (Honda, Nissan, Toyota, et al.) and to launch an impressively effective counterattack. In large measure, the authors conclude, the improvement in the US industry's fortunes is attributable to its capacity to adopt and adapt the cost-control, employee-empowerment, productivity, and quality- assurance techniques pioneered by Japanese manufacturers. As Ingrassia and White make clear, however, the makeover was convulsive on the assembly line as well as in the executive suite. The authors do a fine job of reconstructing the boardroom coups that resulted in the ouster of such old-guard stalwarts as Chrysler's Lee Iacocca, Ford's Don Peterson, and GM's Bob Stempel (the unfortunate engineer who inherited the god-awful mess Roger Smith had made of the planet's largest commercial enterprise). Covered as well are the lesser lights who designed the passenger vehicles (Chrysler's Neon and Ford's born-again Mustang among others), plus the plant managers who reconciled the requirements of lean production with the aspirations of a unionized work force accustomed to adversarial labor relations. On the minus side of the ledger, Ingrassia and White have not resisted the temptation to include whatever they've learned in more than a decade on the automotive beat, and their narrative occasionally veers into trivial byways. Nonetheless, an engrossing and cautionary take on a consequential industry whose welfare is everybody's business. (16 pages of photos, not seen) (First serial to the Wall Street Journal; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-79214-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
A wonderful pudding of a book that serves up large helpings of US socioeconomic history over the past 35 years or so. The title and subtitle notwithstanding, GQ columnist Nocera never makes clear precisely what he means by the middle class. Nor does he provide a systematic reckoning on the financial times since 1958 (when BankAmerica launched what became the Visa credit card). What he does offer, though, are thoroughly engrossing takes on the breakthrough innovations that democratized America's monetary life. There are tellingly detailed briefings on the largely unsung creators of money-market mutual funds (including the first to give investors check-writing privileges), NOW accounts, negotiable CDs, no-load mutual funds, and other financial services that an affluent society now takes for granted. The author also profiles the bankers, Wall Streeters, and others who played leading roles in a revolution that profoundly altered Main Street's attitudes toward credit, debt, investment, and savings. Cases in point range from Peter Lynch (Fidelity's star portfolio manager until his 1990 retirement) through Charles Schwab (of discount brokerage fame), Citicorp's Walter Wriston, and Marshall Loeb (former editor of Money, which continues to overstate the rewards while minimizing the risks of do-it-yourself capitalism). Assessed as well are the convulsive consequences of Paul Volcker's conquest of inflation, deregulation of depository institutions, the stock market's 1987 crash, and the low interest rates that channeled increasing amounts of money into equities during the early 1990s. Conspicuous by its absence, though, is any sustained coverage of the S&L scandals, insider trading, the takeover boom, junk bonds, the assets controlled by insurance companies, derivative securities products, exchange-listed options, futures contracts, and allied aspects of the domestic financial scene. Even so, Nocera delivers a savvy rundown on the landmark developments that in less than four decades have made consumer finance a multilateral bazaar in which beating the markets is a populist pastime.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-66756-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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