A review by gregkraken
Iacocca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca, William Novak

informative relaxing

4.5

I picked up Iacocca in a bookstore in Antiparos, from an English section that felt like it was exclusively stocked with books left behind by tourists (I left one of my own).

This turned out to be the perfect book for me on this trip – it was light but extremely differentiated compared to what I generally read. 

  • It's written far enough back in the past that half of the appeal is seeing how attitudes concerning business, society, etc., have changed.

  • In particular I was fascinated by the discussion of labor relations, especially during his period at Crystler. He was very positive / respectful of the role unions have to play in American capitalism. At the same time, he seems to make an outlandish (to my ear) case that PTO policies are compltely foolish.

  • Among modern business icons, most are founder/CEO types; I liked getting the perspective of a pure-operator CEO. I think this was a personality type that was more valuabled in America prior to the age of the tech startup / unicorn.

I originally read this book in college, for a course called History of American Business. In that class, the professor generally had a pet theory he wanted us to figure out, and class discussions were mostly the whole class trying to work out what that was.

I think for this book, the theory was something about how pro-competition government policies held American business back post-WWII. There's a section where Iacocca says that after he got fired from Ford, he was, for the first time, able to get dinner with a GM executive who lived next door to him. He also talks about how U.S. competition laws put American car manufacturers at a disadvantage to Japanese companies.