Crash Course

### By Paul Ingrassia

**Estimated Reading Time:** 42 minutes

**What You'll Learn**

The complete story of how America's greatest industry rose to world dominance and then collapsed under the weight of its own success. You will understand the innovations that built Detroit, the cultural rot that destroyed it, the Japanese challenge that exposed its weaknesses, and the government rescue that saved it from extinction. More importantly, you will learn why institutions fail and what it takes to avoid the same fate.

**Who This Book Is For**

This book is for anyone who wants to understand how great organizations decline. It is for business leaders who sense complacency creeping into their companies. It is for students of American economic history who want to see the twentieth century through the lens of its most important industry. And it is for readers who simply want to understand how an industry that once employed millions and defined American prosperity could end up begging for a government bailout.

The American automobile industry did not simply decline. It fell from the highest peak any industry had ever reached, and it fell slowly, over decades, while the people in charge insisted everything was fine. At its height, General Motors was the largest corporation in the world. It employed more than 600,000 people. It controlled half the American car market. Its factories produced vehicles at a rate unmatched anywhere on earth. The company was so dominant that its leaders worried about antitrust action, not competition. Ford had revolutionized manufacturing itself, creating the assembly line and the five-dollar day. Chrysler had pioneered automotive engineering and design. Together, the Big Three built the American middle class, transformed the landscape with highways and suburbs, and created a way of life that became the envy of the world. Then, over the course of a few decades, it all unraveled. The story of how this happened is not a simple tale of foreign competition or changing markets. It is a story about human nature. About what happens when success breeds arrogance. About how institutions designed to solve problems become institutions designed to protect themselves. About how people at every level, from factory floors to executive suites, choose comfort over change until change is forced upon them. Paul Ingrassia spent his career covering this industry. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on General Motors' management turmoil in 1993. He watched from press rooms and boardrooms as Detroit's leaders made the decisions that would determine the industry's fate. In Crash Course, he tells the full story with the depth and clarity that only a journalist who lived through it could provide. The book is not a eulogy. It is an autopsy. It examines…