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This chapter explores how the debate over the Chrysler bailout within the business community highlighted persistent tensions over what “free market” solutions really should look like, as well as business's ongoing policy struggle with the liberal regulatory state. By the end of the 1970s, industrial lobbyists led by major employers' associations had notched a number of significant political victories and established themselves as powerful players in national policymaking. Organized business groups played key roles in stopping the forward tide of liberal reform legislation and spreading a market-oriented, antiregulatory vision throughout American political culture. For many lobbyists and executives, however, such achievements represented only a starting point toward loftier goals: the severe rollback of environmental, consumer, and workplace regulations and the comprehensive overhaul of the regulatory apparatus.

Case studies are presented of five high‐yield US companies and the strategies they have pursued to maximize the value of their assets, labor force, products and markets. The examples show how businesses have responded to the pressures of economic change by modifying their strategies, adopting new technologies, and changing their supply chains and distribution channels; they also show how high‐yield issuers have responded to increasing competition in both domestic and international markets. A common story appears to repeat itself throughout the case studies: in utilizing the high‐yield market, companies not only went beyond traditional sources of capital but also created functions that went beyond traditional industrial categories. The companies are placed in the historical context of their foundations to give a sense of their place in their industries and in the economy as a whole, and these histories show that innovation was not new to any of them; they are Stone Container, McCaw Cellular, Viacom Incorporated, the Chrysler Corporation, and Medco Containment Services. The last part of the chapter discusses the use of high‐yield bond financing to improve efficiency by mergers and acquisitions.

BLMC, Chrysler UK, and British Leyland operated in a national and world economic macroeconomic environment, shaped by the petroleum shortages of the 1970s, pronounced swings in car demand, escalating price inflation, and low economic growth rates. The British economy was affected by particular problems of low growth rates in personal disposable income and employment as well as unstable currency exchange rates, adverse balance of payments, active trade-union movement, and uncertainty of entry into the EC. BLMC and CUK management blamed these external factors for the decline of their firms. This chapter analyses the corporate troubles that afflicted these car makers. The problems of CUK and BLMC were historically developed, multifaceted, and pervasive. The rescue programmes were simplistic. The methods, beliefs, and operations of the 1940s and 1950s were overwhelmed by the changing competitive environment of the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter returns to the business world to look at Henry Ford, whose leadership inaugurated a qualitative leap from craft to mass production and gave rise to the term ‘Fordism’. It discusses how Ford enabled vast numbers of Americans to own cars because his prices were so low, but he persisted in assuming that price was critical long after many of his former customers had drifted away to the cars of General Motors and Chrysler, where the competitive edge was in novelty and product enhancements not simply price. It notes that Ford was a pacifist who spent a vast personal fortune leasing a ‘peace ship’ to sail to Europe and stop the First World War—but he simultaneously made an even bigger fortune with his production of munitions, boats, tanks, planes, and jeeps in both wars.

This chapter describes Eduardo's agreement with the Chrysler Corporation. Love and Townsend made Eduardo an offer that Chrysler would buy 40 percent of the shares of Barreiros Diesel. Eduardo thought that such a large investment in his firm by such a rich company would assist him with his current financial difficulties. Love recognized Eduardo's great qualities, and knew that he was the only motor manufacturer who could do everything in a factory. Before this, there had never been such an arrangement between an American and a Spanish company. In Spain, this association seemed to be a really reinvigorating idea for Barreiros Diesel, a new company in an old country. The United States, still considered a new country to Europe, appeared to stand for the future.

This chapter discusses life at Barreiros Diesel in Spain, which, with its remarkable factory at Villaverde, was increasingly marked by a kulturkampf, a struggle of cultures, the Spanish and the North Americans. The ways of Barreiros Diesel and Chrysler were opposed. Neither was able to adapt to the other. It was no one's fault, but the chasm was profound. The list of ways in which Barreiros was supposed to adapt with respect to the accounting in the contract of October 1963 was only the beginning. Eduardo believed that his relations with the Americans would be so good that all kinds of opportunities would soon open up to him and Barreiros Diesel. The success of Barreiros Diesel had made it easy for Eduardo and Valeriano to recruit outstanding men as senior staff.

This chapter describes the difference in work culture between the American executives and the Spaniards at Barreiros Diesel. At the end of 1963, less than three months after the signature of the agreement in October, the first American executives from Chrysler arrived in Madrid to take up their places inside the Barreiros Diesel enterprise. There were a few of them; they were all men, they seemed eminently Anglo-Saxon in looks, and they appeared timid at first. Most of Barreiros Diesel's leaders were scornful of the first Chrysler people in Madrid, many of whom seemed to spend a lot of time at parties at the United States embassy. To the hard-working Spaniards at Villaverde, they seemed lazy, an accusation that must read improbably considering the usual attitude of Anglo-Saxons to the work habits of Spaniards.

This chapter discusses the disagreement of Eduardo with the Chrysler Corporation. At the beginning of 1966, Eduardo was still uttering sweet words about his American partners, at least in public. Chrysler indeed wanted to participate in all the plans for Galicia and to dismantle much of the Barreiros group, selling the dependent companies in order to increase liquidity and concentrate on companies that sold saloon cars. The Chryslerization of Barreiros slowly continued, with new colors and sketches, new emblems and new materials, new pictures and fábricas, even new work clothes, such as those in all Chrysler plants all over the world. Eduardo had been accustomed to using Colombiana de Automoción S.A. for his exports in Colombia, but Chrysler had at its disposal another firm there, Colombiana de Motores S.A., and there was talk not of collaboration but of competition.

This chapter discusses the adversities faced by Barreiros Diesel in Spain, which at the time of Chrysler's capture of power in the company at the end of 1967 was worth a little more than $36 million. That included 850 million pesetas for the land on which the fábrica had been built and over 140 million in buildings. Most of the old company products were still a success, Eduardo, through the gifted Julio Vidal, the able coruñés who served the firm in Egypt, had most advantageously just sold 200 military lorries to King Faisal. Of the new products of the Chrysler era, the Simca was now selling well. Even though Chrysler was in full control of Barreiros Diesel, the managers of that body did not hesitate to introduce changes in the company.

This chapter describes the resignation of Eduardo from Barreiros Diesel. A proposal soon came from Chrysler that led directly to the conclusion of the struggle between the famous company of Detroit and Eduardo Barreiros. Eduardo was called, together by Chrysler's representatives, to discuss a new capital increase. The Barreiros family was still against Chrysler's idea and Eduardo said that the argument that it was necessary to raise the money was Chrysler's, not his. There was a clause in the agreement between Eduardo and Chrysler that restrained Eduardo from any kind of work concerned with motors or vehicles for five years. The text of the agreement said that, having obtained the appropriate permission from the government, the Barreiros family would sell their shares in Barreiros Diesel.

This chapter discusses Eduardo's interests in agriculture. The chief concession that Eduardo gave to Chrysler in the summer of 1969 was one which declared that after he left Barreiros Diesel, he would not work in the world of motors for five years. In the 1970s, the Barreiros family would go to mass at La Solana when they spent the weekend at the finca, as they often did. There, too, Eduardo would find his builders, his painters, his carpenters, and eventually, his cowmen. As soon as he had bought the farm, he realized that its soil was even drier than he had supposed. Eduardo began to look for water, to seek subterranean rivers, and also sought out sophisticated geologists and old-fashioned water diviners.

The Linwood car plant, which opened in 1963, encapsulated the modernisation of Scotland’s industrial base. The distinct labour and production practices of the motor industry, coupled with US ownership under the Chrysler Corporation from 1967 to 1978, clashed with the Clydeside workers’ moral code, transmitted to Linwood through migration. Intermittent redundancies frustrated moral economy expectations of employment stability and financial security. Craft culture was nevertheless asserted, and workers constructed a strong trade-union organisation. In new communities around Linwood there was only limited evidence of the home-centred social life associated with the ‘affluent’ workers of assembly-goods manufacturing in southern England. Linwood’s closure in 1981, accelerated by the Conservative government’s macro-economic management, contributed to widening political divergence between Scotland and England.

The third chapter examines the story of Detroit’s rebirth through both a reliance on its storied past and the possibilities of the future through an examination of a wildly successful commercial starring Eminem. It provides the connective tissue between the storied past of Detroitas as a location of workers and the contemporary narrative of a city on the rise. At its center is the mythic tale provided by the 2011 Chrysler “Born of Fire” commercial. The narrative tale of a rebirth of a city, and by extension the American auto industry, in the face of epic decline makes the story of Detroit the ultimate comeback tale—a phoenix rising from the ashes of destruction.

The way in which this manager relied on his network to obtain information and knowledge critical to the success of an important project is common and likely resonates with your own experience. Usually when we think of where people turn for information or knowledge we think of databases, the Web, intranets and portals or other, more traditional, repositories such as file cabinets or policy and procedure manuals. However, a significant component of a person’s information environment consists of the relationships he or she can tap for various informational needs. For example, in summarizing a decade worth of studies, Tom Allen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that engineers and scientists were roughly five times more likely to turn to a person for information than to an impersonal source such as a database or a file cabinet. In other settings, research has consistently shown that who you know has a significant impact on what you come to know, as relationships are critical for obtaining information, solving problems, and learning how to do your work. Particularly in knowledge-intensive work, creating an informational environment that helps employees solve increasingly complex and often ambiguous problems holds significant performance implications. Frequently such efforts entail knowledge-management initiatives focusing on the capture and sharing of codified knowledge and reusable work products. To be sure, these so-called knowledge bases hold pragmatic benefits. They bridge boundaries of time and space, allow for potential reuse of tools or work products employed successfully in other areas of an organization, and provide a means of reducing organizational “forgetting” as a function of employee turnover. However, such initiatives often undervalue crucial knowledge held by employees and the web of relationships that help dynamically solve problems and create new knowledge. As we move further into an economy where collaboration and innovation are increasingly central to organizational effectiveness, we must pay more attention to the sets of relationships that people rely on to accomplish their work. Certainly we can expect emerging collaborative technologies to facilitate virtual work and skill-profiling systems to help with the location of relevant expertise.

The Second-Shifters Filed in slowly on a late Thursday afternoon. From the outside, the factory was a long (nearly a third of a mile), nondescript white box, baking silently in the desert sun of the Ramos Arizpe mountain valley. Inside, it was fairly dark and noisy, with long rows of metal-stamping machines, soldering stations, and assembly lines. Neat green pathways edged with yellow lines, stretching as far as the eye could see, marked the safe routes through. Full-sized and colorful cardboard cutouts of a smiling man and woman greeted workers, highlighting appropriate safety gear. The operators, an even mix of men and women, meandered down the green paths like high school students reluctantly heading to class. There were young men with sagging jeans and others with Def Leppard and Metallica T-shirts. One young man sported a fauxhawk. Another had a pony tail and looked slightly hungover. Many of the women wore tight-fitting jeans, some of them bejeweled. A large number appeared to be in their teens. The factory in Ramos Arizpe—a desiccated and spacious industrial valley just southwest of Monterrey, Nuevo León, and just north of Saltillo, Coahuila—was on a refrigerator continental divide. The Whirlpool, Maytag, and KitchenAid refrigerators they assembled here—including the side-by-side, which had been perfected and popularized by Galesburg’s Admiral plant fifty years earlier—flowed north. The hip and colorful Brastemp side-by-sides shipped south to Brazil. The enormous Whirlpool factory was only seven years old in 2013, but it paled in comparison to the massive Dodge Ram truck plant we visited on the other side of Saltillo. Planta Ensamble Saltillo had its own valley, rigorous security, and produced 220,000 trucks a year in nearly infinite combinations of engine sizes, body types, and colors. It sat next to a Chrysler engine factory and a DHL logistics center, which handled some of the highly complicated sequencing for the massive operation. From the back of an electric cart, we saw Dodge trucks start off as metal pieces, pressed out and shaped by hundreds of enormous robotic arms, jerking precisely from position to position, sending up sparks behind tall metal cages.