Tariq Albazzaz

Detailed, but a bit long/repetitive

Revisado: 06-24-19

I bought this book to learn more about the domestic auto industry and how it's been faring with increasing globalization over the past few decades. Dauch does a pretty good job of providing a lot of details of the inner workings of the company. This book was written only a few years before he died.

Things I liked:
- Details about the manufacturing process and reasoning for offshoring

Things I didn't like:
- As another reviewer commented, the author comes off a bit egotistical at times, going on at length about himself and his "virtues"
- It gets repetitive. A couple times, I thought I had gone backwards in the audio and had to check to make sure I was going forward. Some passages and themes are repeated verbatim several times.

The main premise of the issues the author says he had are with the UAW, the united auto workers union. This takes up a very large portion of the book, and there is constant talking down about unions. While I can understand this in many respects, and I didn't feel he's lying about a lot of the things he said, unions are also the reason we have 40 hour workweeks as well as many other things. He cites Germany several times as a country to lookup to in industrial policy, but fails to mention the massive involvement of unions there (Mitbestimmung), with around half the board of directors being represented by unions. His company also increasingly invested in Mexico and Asia to export components instead of the right-to-work states that he heralds repeatedly.

The story cuts out in the last few chapters right in the midst of the auto industry downturn in the recession. I later found through googling that they closed several of the plants he talked about building up throughout the book. In fact, I think only one of those 3 or so is still left today. The author died right around this time.

The last chapter was especially interesting because it covers what US regulators could do to incentivize more domestic production in manufacturing.

Overall, I still think it's a good read, although I felt like the book could have been shortened quite a bit. Throughout the story of the company, he also details many things he did to save money and increase efficiency.

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interesting story

Revisado: 12-31-18

the book tells the story of an American manufacturer who eventually had to compete with imports, and then raised provisions in trade acts to fight unfair imports. I was hoping for a bit more material centered around manufacturing processes specifically, but this was really my fault in looking beyond the book as more of a story than of a technical writing on industry.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Interesting Book

Revisado: 09-24-18

This was a good read after continually hearing, for years, about high qualities of living in Scandinavian countries. The author does a great job of pointing out many realities that are not widely mentioned, as well as the faults in surveys that these quality-of-life metrics are founded on. There were also many funny passages about strange cultural norms.

On the other hand, sometimes I got the feeling as if the author was trying hard to paint something negatively. I lived abroad in Japan for almost 2 years, so I can definitely understand the frustration of seemingly nonsensical things in a foreign country - those kinds of things ate at me and others immigrants I knew while living there. I felt like this was the same feeling he was expressing in some of his writing. However, near the very end of the book, he started to paint a much better picture of the country and pointed out its great strengths. I couldn't help but think that the aim of the book was to aggressively debunk misunderstandings and myths about Scandinavia, but while reminding readers that he still thinks it is a great place.

I enjoyed this book.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Interesting book

Revisado: 09-24-18

I enjoyed this book, and it gave many great examples of things I wrote down to look into further. However, there were 2 issues I found:

#1 The book tends to look very favorably on 3D printing as a replacement to traditional manufacturing. While I'm not an expert on 3D printing, the general consensus from people I've spoken to at trade fairs and who use 3D printing in their work, as well as that online, is that this process is more complementary than an outright replacement. 3D printing has been around for decades, and the applications are more for complex and customized parts, but not so much in things for mass production. Maybe this will change, but the lack of materials, the slow speed, as well as other issues, make 3D printing not exactly the extreme game-changer that many people tend to herald it to be, such as the author. Cost and speed make traditional methods like injection molds and milling more realistic. However, even the factories using these methods are introducing more automation into those processes, and this is where I still see the forest for the trees with what the author is saying.

#2 I was hoping that the author would use more business numbers in his analysis. This is something that I feel is incredibly lacking in economic discourse. Economic theory tends to look at things like general equilibrium, for example, that can leave out massive factors in forecasting what happens in reality. Theory tends to assume a frictionless environment without barriers to labor mobility, regulation, and a myriad of other things. This just does not work in reality. I feel like economics tends to look at things from a very high-level instead of that which shows direct impact to industry. This book I think does this in terms of its repeated mention of 3D printing, for example.

I still enjoyed this book thoroughly, and I definitely recommend it.

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