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Inside The Race To Transform An American Icon
Walker & Company
February 2009
On Sale: February 3, 2009
288 pages ISBN: 0802717187 EAN: 9780802717184 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In November, GM CEO Rick Wagoner appeared before Congress to
ask for $25 billion to bail out the struggling Big Three
automakers. To critics like Thomas Freidman and Mitt Romney,
it was a sign that the American auto industry should be led
out to pasture; if the Japanese are better at making cars,
they said, then we should let them do it. To defenders, the
loss of the country's largest manufacturing sector would be
an incomprehensible disaster. Nearly every day, the debate
rages on the op-ed pages. Billions of dollars and millions
of jobs hang in the balance. In Why GM Matters, William Holstein goes deep inside GM to
show what's really happening at the country's most iconic
corporation. Where critics say that GM has sat on its hands
while the market changed, Holstein demonstrates that GM has
already radically retooled its entire operation, from
manufacturing and cost structure to design. Where pundits
say we'd be better off without GM, he shows how inextricably
linked GM and the nation's economy still are: The country's
largest private buyer of IT, the world's largest buyer of
steel, the holder of pensions for 780,000 Americans, GM
accounts for a full 1 percent of our country's GDP. A dollar
spent on GM has profoundly different consequences from a
dollar spent on Toyota. Following a diverse cast of characters--from Rick Wagoner,
the controversial CEO, to design director Bob Boniface, to
Linda Flowers, a team leader on the line in Kansas
City--Holstein examines the state of GM's health and builds
a persuasive argument that GM is essential to our nation's
well-being and, with the right economic climate, ready to
compete with Toyota as one of the biggest global automakers.
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