Why David Halberstam's "The Reckoning" Should Be Mandatory Business School Reading

The Roots of the American Automobile Industry's Massive Decline

David Halberstam's 1986 book "The Reckoning" is the third and final book of his trilogy study of the forces of power in America. The first, "The Best and Brightest", examined Presidents Kennedy and Johnson's political advisor "brain trust" and how their management of the Vietnam War went terribly wrong. (George W. Bush could've learned a few lessons from this book).

The second book in the trilogy was "The Powers That Be", a study of media power and influence via biographies of CBS boss William Paley, Time Magazine's Henry Luce, and The Washington Post's Katherine Graham.

"The Reckoning", by Halberstam's own admission, is the most ambitious of the three. It's a parallel history and study of the American and Japanese automobile industries, using Nissan and Ford Motors as study examples.

Although "The Reckoning" is a twenty year old book, its message has never been truer than it is now as America's once leading automobile industry is heading for deep decline. In my opinion, Halberstam's book should be re-titled as "The Warning." By the time this book was published in 1986, the United States had already gone through two devastating energy crises orchestrated by OPEC. While Ford Motors had experienced some success with its energy-conscious Ford Taurus, the production emphasis was still on gas guzzling trucks and luxury vehicles. While praising Nissan and other Japanese car companies' business model of affordability, fuel economy and quality control, he doesn't completely let them off the hook in his description of Nissan's union strife in the fifties.

In Halberstam'a own words, he describes why he wrote the book: "one day I was on a book tour and I kept noticing that Chrysler was almost gone, Ford was in trouble, all those great American companies were (gone). ... The Japanese were taking cars, which was an American signature, and doing better at them. I didn't see it as a business story. I saw it as a social cultural story."