The apprentice from Govan, or why the best football book for executives is really about manufacturing
Sir Alex Ferguson wrote Leading with Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist, and the book is usually shelved as sport or as Silicon Valley self-improvement. Both shelvings miss the point. Read it closely and it is a book about running an industrial operation, written by a man who was formed on a factory floor and never really left it.
Read the essay →The problem of conjecture, or what Kissinger knew before he was Kissinger
The first volume of Niall Ferguson's Kissinger, covering the years 1923 to 1968, ends where most books about the man begin. It stops on the day he was handed power. That makes it something unexpected and, for anyone who runs anything, more useful. It is a nine-hundred-page study of how an unknown becomes indispensable.
Read the essay →The metal remembers, or why civilisation rests on an industry almost nobody thinks about
John Campbell's Complete Casting Handbook is nominally a technical reference for foundry engineers. Read it cover to cover and it turns out to be something rarer – a passionate argument that the world's oldest manufacturing process is also its most misunderstood, and that almost everything we make stands on it.
Read the essay →Thirty-nine drops of solder, or what Rockefeller knew about making things and saying things
John D. Rockefeller built the most profitable manufacturing enterprise of the nineteenth century, then watched a single journalist demolish its reputation while he said nothing at all. Chernow's Titan, read as a study of precision in production and in language, becomes something closer to a manual.
Read the essay →The Arsenal and the Shipyard, or why nations that stop making things stop mattering
In 1797 Venice, for centuries the richest manufacturing city in Europe, surrendered to Napoleon without firing a shot. In 1972 a Korean engineer raised the money for a shipyard with little more than an old banknote and a photograph of an empty beach. Read together, the two stories carry one of the plainest lessons economic history has to offer.
Read the essay →