Essential business reading, with advice on how manufacturers can join the AM bandwagon.
How 3-D printing and related technologies will soon “transform the way practically everything is made.”
“Business will never be the same,” writes management strategist D’Aveni (Strategy/Dartmouth Coll.; Strategic Capitalism: The New Economic Strategy for Winning the Capitalist Cold War, 2012, etc.). His readable, well-researched book traces the rise of 3-D printing from its inception in a late-night 1983 experiment to its present applications in manufacturing hearing aids, joint implants, and fighter jets to its quietly evolving role in the rise of giant new businesses he calls pan-industrials, which will “dominate the global economy” within a few decades. As the author explains, 3-D printing is one of many methods known as additive manufacturing, which involves building up materials to make a product. Once AM was deemed useful solely for making customized products in small quantities. Now, it is being used to make “standardized products in mass quantities” by companies like GE and Lockheed Martin, drawn by AM’s extraordinary ability to make “almost anything anywhere,” with greater flexibility, economies of scope and scale, and “levels of quality and efficiency once thought impossible.” Combined with innovative digital tools, writes the author, AM methods will soon replace traditional manufacturing. The resulting pan-industrial firms—“voracious, ever-expanding industrial titans”—will serve as AM–based platforms connecting customers and suppliers in the same manner as Amazon and other consumer platforms. D’Aveni acknowledges that all of this sounds “astounding,” but it is real, and he offers vivid accounts of how AM is playing out today at Zara, a Spanish apparel maker, and Jabil, a Florida-based electronics supplier. Focusing on business (as opposed to technical) aspects, the author details the many benefits of AM and its likely social consequences (obsolescence of millions of jobs but also enough new value in the economy to fund a universal basic income). “Virtually every” manufacturer will have to face this revolution, he writes.
Essential business reading, with advice on how manufacturers can join the AM bandwagon.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-95590-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
“Ideology is fairy tales for adults.” Thus writes economist and conservative maven Sowell in a best-of volume shot through with…ideology.
Though he resists easy categorization, the author has been associated with hard-libertarian organizations and think tanks such as the Hoover Institution for most of his long working life. Here he picks from his numerous writings, which have the consistency of an ideologue—e.g., affirmative action is bad, period. It’s up to parents, not society or the schools, to be sure that children are educated. Ethnic studies and the “mania for ‘diversity’ ” produce delusions. Colleges teach impressionable Americans to “despise American society.” Minimum-wage laws are a drag on the economy. And so on. Sowell is generally fair-minded, reasonable and logical, but his readers will likely already be converts to his cause, for which reason he does not need to examine all the angles of a problem. (If it is true that most gun violence is committed in households where domestic abuse has taken place, then why not take away the abusers’ guns as part of the legal sentencing?) Often his arguments are very smart, as when he examines the career of Booker T. Washington, who was adept in using white people’s money to advance his causes while harboring no illusions that his benefactors were saints. Sometimes, though, Sowell’s sentiments emerge as pabulum, as when he writes, in would-be apothegms: “Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can’t stop with just one”; “I can understand why some people like to drive slowly. What I cannot understand is why they get in the fast lane to do it.” The answer to the second question, following Sowell, might go thus: because they’re liberals and the state tells them to do it, just to get in the way of hard-working real Americans. A solid, representative collection by a writer and thinker whom one either agrees with or not—and there’s not much middle ground on which to stand.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-465-02250-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
SEEN & HEARD
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