Car: A Drama of the American Workplace Book

[Tom] Breault . . . came up with a system to guide [top engineer Lew Veraldi] through dense material. When Breault presented a report, he would highlight both his copy and Veraldi's. . . . Eventually, Veraldi realized something was odd. 'Am I the only one in the room with a highlighted copy?' he asked suspiciously. 'Why? Am I the only one who can't follow this?' Breault thought quickly. 'No, sir,' he answered. 'It's because you're the only vice president in the room.'

An astonishing journey into the belly of our most important industry, a portrait of the energy and ingenuity of America at work. Their job, as the wife of the chief engineer put it, was to repaint the Mona Lisa. Faced with redesigning the Taurus, America's best-selling car and the flagship of its fleet, Ford Motor Company assembles 700 designers, engineers, planners, and bean-counters under a tough manager who set out to retake ground lost to the Japanese. On their shoulders rest the reputation and the profits of Ford, not to mention an investment of about 3 billion dollars. A cross between The Reckoning and The Dilbert Principle, this biting, insightful, and often funny account by a seasoned journalist follows the 1996 Taurus from its conception as a clay model in Detroit to its birth in an Atlanta assembly plant to its public debut in a New Jersey dealership. Mary Walton all but lived with the team for two years in a damp Dearborn basement, and she chronicles firsthand the clashes of designers and engineers over shapes, of marketers and accountants over costs, of product guys in Detroit and manufacturing guys in Atlanta as the new machine takes shape on the assembly line. And all of them, all of the time, are looking over their shoulders at the Japanese competition. The Taurus is a single product, but it contains thousands of parts, and just as many stories. Walton has woven these together brilliantly into a book that reveals the tension, the passions, and the pride that fuel the race to #1.