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 It
was only 15 years ago that Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White of The
Wall Street Journal's Michigan bureau co-authored Comeback: The
Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry, a book that chronicled
how Detroit automakers rallied back to profitability after a mistake-filled
1980s.
Now, Ingrassia is
back with an explanation of how the Detroit's car companies traveled from
1995 Glory Road to 2009 Disaster Highway, where the federal government
finally had to bail out two-thirds of the not-longer-quite-so-Big Three.
Ingrassia takes a
long running start. A timeline that spans the book's first four pages
starts in 1908 with the introduction of the Model T, the car that put
not only the United States but the world on wheels not drawn by four-legged
horsepower. That timeline ends in the spring and summer of 2009, when
Chrysler and General Motors entered bankruptcy under the fatherly hand
of Uncle Sam.
Don't worry, GM and
Chrysler fans, Ford's management mistakes - and its desperate turnaround
-- don't escape Ingrassia dissection in this book.
Indeed. Smug self-confidence,
ego, failure to adapt better ideas, tone-deaf, missed opportunities, insularity,
arrogance and inherently unstable business model are words and phrases
Ingrassia uses repeatedly to describe what was happening within each of
the Big Three.
And it wasn't just
the car companies he faults as he details the role the United Auto Workers
and its leadership played in this drama of demise.
Speaking of demise,
consider that in 2005, General Motors had $24 billion in cash, and yet
- just four years later -- when the bail-out occurred, the company was
in debt by an even larger figure!
Speaking of the drama,
Ingrassia brings the impact down to a personal level throughout the book
as he revisits father-and-son autoworkers in a Chrysler plant in northern
Illinois and a car dealer in Maine to show how decisions in Detroit impact
people and their communities across the country, impact to the point that
the federal government either had to become involved or let two-thirds
of the Big Three self-destruct and perhaps take not only the American
auto industry but the American economy down with them.
Which brings us to
what I found to be the most fascinating part of Crash Course, Ingrassia's
detailed reporting about the new president's Automotive Task Force.
Like the Whiz Kids,
a group of former U.S. Army Air Force officers with exceptional business
skills hired after World War II by a young Henry Ford II who recognized
that he needed help, the task force members had no experience in the auto
industry but they certainly knew about business and finance and were in
a position to ask the tough questions - and to demand the answers - that
Detroit had refused to ask of itself for so many years.
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