Sixty to Zero: An Inside Look at the Collapse of General Motors-and the Detroit Auto Industry by Alex Taylor III (review)

126 The Michigan Historical Review Alex Taylor III. Sixty to Zero: An Inside Look at the Collapse of General Motors—and the Detroit Auto Industry. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 272. Index. Cloth, $26.00; paper, $17.00. At what point does bad management lead to a company’s irreversible collapse? In Sixty to Zero, Alex Taylor explores this question based on his many years as an auto journalist for Fortune magazine. The failure of General Motors (GM) was surely the most spectacular collapse, if also the most gradual. In its glory days in the 1950s, GM claimed as much as 57 percent of the entire U.S. automobile market and bragged about a return on investment of 25 percent. Yes, 25 percent! By 1982 its market share had slipped to 44 percent and then slumped to 31 percent in 1997. By 2005 GM represented just 24 percent of the market, and before it slipped into bankruptcy, it could only manage a 21 percent stake in 2008. Many GM executives blamed the recession or the United Auto Workers (UAW), but Taylor takes the view of one insider who calls the company’s troubles “self-inflicted” (p. 200). Taylor argues that management should have long ago taken a stronger stance against the UAW and that dating back as far as the 1960s, GM’s CEOs made a series of missteps. For example, Frederic Donner “didn’t know his customers,” only the firm’s finances (p. 21). Not knowing consumers led to all sorts of problems in marketing GM’s brands. In addition, Taylor faults GM executives for failing to realize economies of scale in production. He then complains that after Harley Earl’s retirement as head of design at GM, designers were constrained by engineering and production executives. GM cars lacked any pizzazz. By the middle of the 1980s, Taylor writes that GM had the factories to sell vehicles for half of the market, but its share of that market had dwindled further to a shocking 35 percent (p. 64). This gap should have set off alarm bells among the firm’s top managers, but apparently it did not. Taylor faults GM managers for being insular: they expected loyalty from their subordinates and promoted from within. In hindsight, it may seem easy to point to GM’s mismanagement as the reason for its decline. One would like to know more about the board of directors: to what extent did they simply rubber-stamp management’s wishes? One would like to know more too about the role of the media. To his credit, Taylor not only tells the story of the decline of GM (and the other two U.S. automakers), but he also tells readers how he, as a journalist, was snookered by GM, drinking its “Kool-Aid” (p. 223). This was the best part of the book. The media Book Reviews 127 not only reports information to the public, but also shapes the public’s opinions. In Sixty to Zero, the reader gets a glimpse of how GM courted journalists in order to reach investors and presumably bolster its stock price. Sally H. Clarke University of Texas at Austin ...