The Critical Path: Inventing an Automobile and Reinventing a Corporation Book

The story of how Chrysler's minivan team created an automobile that captured the 1995 Motor Trend Car of the Year and other major awards - and reinvented a perilously entrenched corporation in the process - is as dramatic and inspiring a story as any in business today. Brock Yates, one of the most respected writers in the auto world, was given unprecedented access to Chrysler - every planning session, presentation, budget review, test drive, assembly line start-up, and marketing launch. The result is a book that unveils the mysteries of modern car-making, revealing how cars are shaped through countless interlinked decisions ranging from size and power to door configurations, color selections, and innumerable other interconnected details. It also captures the complex process by which the thousands of separate pieces that make up a car are designed, tested, manufactured, and marshaled into place at the exact moment they are needed. For any reader who cares about cars, this is the most intriguing look inside the mysteries of their creation ever written. At the same time, The Critical Path recounts an extraordinary drama of all-too-human managers attempting to make something new, in a new way, inside a corporate culture that resists them at every turn. The story of how Chrysler's minivan platform team kept their commitment to quality, schedule, and budget - with a $3 billion investment and the company's fate palpably in the balance - is as encouraging a tale as has emerged from American business in years. The unprecedented triumph and Chrysler's resultant comeback is a lesson in successful management that will be savored by any reader interested in how great companies make breakthroughproducts.

Publishers Weekly

A bolt-by-bolt account of the five-year gestation of Chrysler's latest generation of minivansthe 1996 Dodge Caravan, Plymouth Voyager and Chrysler Town & CountryYates's narrative, which often smacks of boosterism, also delineates the company's shift from a traditional vertical management system to project teams involving cross-pollination of design, engineering, finance and marketing, The minivan sagabeset by internal rivalries, potential disasters, niggling glitches and sluggish production start-up at the mile-long assembly line in a St. Louis, Mo., suburbis framed by the departure of Chrysler chief Lee Iacocca, whom Yates flays as a "self-engrandizing huckster," and by Iacocca and Kirk Kerkorian's failed 1995 hostile takeover bid. The minivans also faced a public relations nightmare: seven major class-action suits alleging that dozens of deaths had resulted from faulty rear latches on early models. Chrysler reached a court settlement, agreeing to replace 60% of the latches or to spend millions on consumer awareness programs. Yates is author of The Decline and Fall of the American Auto Industry. Photos. Translation and U.K. rights: Carol Mann Agency. (Aug.)