Sublime

Manufacturers soldiered on, trying to fix the problem as best as they could. They added extra inventory, inspectors, and rework stations to manage all the problems that the assembly line unfailingly generated. But with these fixes, unfortunately, costs and complexity ballooned. The processes they created simply mitigated the problems, but they were

Jeremy asked me to engineer, prototype, and sell the glass fiber Sea Truck. An art student just beginning my penultimate year at college, I was offered a job as head of a new marine division of Jeremy’s successful engineering company, Rotork. I jumped at the opportunity. Jeremy, however, insisted that I complete my degree, which is why my third-yea

He cared most about freight, never frills; and he apparently never considered that newfangled automobiles, trucks, and hard-surfaced roads could challenge rails as the basic transportation infrastructure of America and of the world.

I did establish in United Motors a unity of business purpose through the principle of return on investment. By placing each division on its own profit-making basis, I gave the general office a common measure of efficiency with which to judge the contribution of each division to the whole.

Another catalyst for Jay’s decision to have a revolution was when Copart disbanded its fleet of tow trucks and began to contract with drivers instead. This improved efficiency and cut transportation and insurance costs. But the decision—which meant laying off hundreds of drivers—also hurt morale.

The product policy we proposed is the one for which General Motors has now long been known. We said first that the corporation should produce a line of cars in each price area, from the lowest price up to one for a strictly high-grade quantity-production car, but we would not get into the fancy-price field with small production; second, that the pr