The Critical Path: Inventing an Automobile and Reinventing a Corporation - Hardcover

Yates, Brock W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316967084 ISBN 13: 9780316967082

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 1996

Synopsis

The story of how Chrysler's minivan team created an automobile that captured the 1995 Motor Trend Car of the Year and other major awards - and reinvented a perilously entrenched corporation in the process - is as dramatic and inspiring a story as any in business today. Brock Yates, one of the most respected writers in the auto world, was given unprecedented access to Chrysler - every planning session, presentation, budget review, test drive, assembly line start-up, and marketing launch. The result is a book that unveils the mysteries of modern car-making, revealing how cars are shaped through countless interlinked decisions ranging from size and power to door configurations, color selections, and innumerable other interconnected details. It also captures the complex process by which the thousands of separate pieces that make up a car are designed, tested, manufactured, and marshaled into place at the exact moment they are needed. For any reader who cares about cars, this is the most intriguing look inside the mysteries of their creation ever written. At the same time, The Critical Path recounts an extraordinary drama of all-too-human managers attempting to make something new, in a new way, inside a corporate culture that resists them at every turn. The story of how Chrysler's minivan platform team kept their commitment to quality, schedule, and budget - with a $3 billion investment and the company's fate palpably in the balance - is as encouraging a tale as has emerged from American business in years. The unprecedented triumph and Chrysler's resultant comeback is a lesson in successful management that will be savored by any reader interested in how great companies make breakthroughproducts.

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Reviews

Yates, as the proverbial fly on the wall, observes the internal workings of Chrysler, from the boardrooms to the assembly lines, at a critical moment in its recent history. Long-time automobile observer Yates, a regular contributor to Car and Driver and other magazines, was allowed unlimited access to the Chrysler Corporation from 1992 on, just when the company was preparing its follow-up to its phenomenally successful minivan line. Chrysler, which had enjoyed fat sales since the 1984 introduction (and invention) of the minivan, had grown soft in its triumph; designers were still relying on the old K car design for new models, and quality control was at an all-time low. Chrysler's next car would make or break the company. Yates ably reconstructs the endless meetings and virtual reinvention of the assembly line that occurred over the next few years. The line was shifted to the Japanese method of kan ban, or ``just in time'' inventory control, which also allowed control of costs by having parts suppliers key their production to Chrysler's needs. Chrysler also took on and turned around AMC/Renault--where workers still used vacuum tubes available only from the Soviet Union--by restoring the Jeep. Yates is at his best when he details the actual building of cars: the repetition of trials, the methods of applying paint, and the sizes of the nuts and bolts. He also admires the ingenuity of the Chrysler engineers, who were under enormous pressure not only to make a new car quickly but also to make it cheaply. The other aspects of Chrysler's history (for example, lee Iacocca's legacy and the corporate infighting under the shadow of Kirk Kerkorian) are less well rendered, but it's the engineers and the assembly line workers, after all, who eventually built Chrysler's new pride and joy, the Town & Country. An informed history of a company in turmoil and the inside story of America's obsession, for better or worse, with cars. (9 pages b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A bolt-by-bolt account of the five-year gestation of Chrysler's latest generation of minivans?the 1996 Dodge Caravan, Plymouth Voyager and Chrysler Town & Country?Yates's narrative, which often smacks of boosterism, also delineates the company's shift from a traditional vertical management system to project teams involving cross-pollination of design, engineering, finance and marketing, The minivan saga?beset by internal rivalries, potential disasters, niggling glitches and sluggish production start-up at the mile-long assembly line in a St. Louis, Mo., suburb?is framed by the departure of Chrysler chief Lee Iacocca, whom Yates flays as a "self-engrandizing huckster," and by Iacocca and Kirk Kerkorian's failed 1995 hostile takeover bid. The minivans also faced a public relations nightmare: seven major class-action suits alleging that dozens of deaths had resulted from faulty rear latches on early models. Chrysler reached a court settlement, agreeing to replace 60% of the latches or to spend millions on consumer awareness programs. Yates is author of The Decline and Fall of the American Auto Industry. Photos. Translation and U.K. rights: Carol Mann Agency.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When Yates (The Decline and Fall of the American Auto Industry, 1983), proposed a book on a car's creation to Chrysler President Bob Lutz, the car on the drawing board happened to be a new design for the minivan. Here, Yates who writes regularly for several automotive and sporting magazines, traces the Chrysler minivan from its introduction in 1984, which he feels saved the corporation, to the development of the current van, which appears to have saved it again. The author insists that his book is written "about the Chrysler Corporation, not for it." He begins his study with Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca's retirement in 1992 but covers the history of Chrysler (and, indeed, the entire industry), chronicling the development of a spirit of inclusion and involvement in all areas of the corporation during the process. The result is a well-thought-out, well-written, and insightful book. Recommended for all types of libraries.?Littleton Maxwell, Business Information Ctr., Univ. of Richmond, Va.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

TITLR Inventing an Automobile and Reinventing a Corporation.Yates, Brock. An effective way to highlight a company's corporate culture or to demonstrate a new management practice or technique is to chronicle the history and development of a project such as an advertising campaign or the introduction of a new product. Yates, who writes about cars and the automobile industry, shows how Chrysler, unable to rest on the laurels of its once dominant minivan, reinvented itself with a new product line. Yates' title stresses the vital nature of the five-year, nearly $3 billion project to come up with a new car, but it also alludes to an operations management technique developed in the late 1950s. In contrast, Chrysler utilized cross-functional platform teams of designers, engineers, and marketers, and Yates' saga demonstrates the viability of this newer management concept.

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316967084
• ISBN 13: 9780316967082
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320