For decades there have been two iconic Japanese auto companies. One has been endlessly studied and written about. The other has been generally underappreciated and misunderstood. Until now.
Since its birth as a motorcycle company in 1949, Honda has steadily grown into the world s fifth largest automaker and top engine manufacturer, as well as one of the most beloved, most profitable, and most consistently innovative multinational corporations. What drives the company that keeps creating and improving award-winning and bestselling models like the Civic, Accord, Odyssey, CR-V, and Pilot?
According to Jeffrey Rothfeder, what truly distinguishes Honda from its competitors, especially archrival Toyota, is a deep commitment to a set of unorthodox management tenets. The Honda Way, as insiders call it, is notable for decentralization over corporate control, simplicity over complexity, experimentation over Six Sigma driven efficiency, and unyielding cynicism toward the status quo and whatever is assumed to be the truth. Honda believes in freely borrowing from the past as a bridge to innovative discontinuity in the present. And those are just a few of the ideas that the company s colorful founder, Soichiro Honda, embedded in the DNA of his start-up sixty-five years ago.
As the first journalist allowed behind Honda s infamously private doors, Rothfeder interviewed dozens of executives, engineers, and frontline employees about its management practices and global strategy. He shows how the company has developed and maintained its unmatched culture of innovation, resilience, and flexibility and how it exported that culture to other countries that are strikingly different from Japan, establishing locally controlled operations in each region where it lays down roots.
For instance, Rothfeder reports on life at a Honda factory in the tiny town of Lincoln, Alabama, and what happened when American workers were trained to follow the Honda Way, as a self-sufficient outpost of the global company. Could they master Honda s three core principles:
Embrace Paradox: Honda encourages respectful disagreement and debate between opposing viewpoints, on matters large and small. New ideas often emerge from conflict.Real Place, Real Part, Real Knowledge: Honda teaches people to argue using facts, not assumptions. One must go to the factory floor, the showroom, the parking lot, the driver s seat, or the truck bed whatever it takes to get the facts and make a decision that can be supported with data.Respect Individualism: Honda often hires people with unusual backgrounds and independent streaks. It promotes those who question the status quo and who would probably struggle in organizations that focus on rigid rules and systems.
Rothfeder shows how the Alabama plant became a new model for manufacturing in America. It can turn out several different types of cars on any given day and up to 300,000 vehicles and engines a year. Its flexible model enables unparalleled responsiveness to market changes and recovery from mistakes.
As Soichiro Honda himself liked to say, Success can be achieved only through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success represents one percent of your work, which results only from the ninety-nine percent that is called failure. "

This encyclopedia of John Deere tractors from around the globe, first published in 1999, is now updated with more than a decade of new Big Green machines. From John Froelich's revolutionary model to the Dain All Wheel Drive, the Waterloo Boy, and the great Johnny Poppers, from the New Generation of Power through to current machines, this guide covers all Deeres everywhere. Here as well as are the famous German Lanz, the Australian Chamberlain, and other tractors built in Europe, South Africa, China, Brazil, Canada, and more. Packed with more than 600 photos of tractors, model variations, brochures, toys, and other memorabilia, it's everything the Deere fan could wish for.

The reach of the car today is almost universal, and its effect on landscapes, cityscapes, cultures - indeed, on the very fabric of the modern world - is profound. Cars have brought benefits to individuals in terms of mobility and expanded horizons, but the cost has been very high in terms of damage to the environment and the consumption of precious resources. Despite the growing belief that a Faustian price is now being paid for the freedom cars have bestowed on us, we are none the less manufacturing them in ever greater numbers.

There is a new quality to be found in the world of automobile magazines: Porsche Klassik has been published by Delius Klasing for all enthusiasts of historical Porsches. With Porsche Klassik Delius Klasing publishes the ultimate magazine twice a year, with fascinating stories about the people and their machines each based around the legendary Porsche. The magazine dives into the history of the brand and its models and shows new perspectives from the Porsche history. Porsche Klassik is produced in close collaboration with Porsche AG.

High performance and utterly thrilling to drive, the muscle car changed the way we view automobiles. Through marketing wars and head to head horse power battles, a carefully curated ideology of what the muscle car should be able to do evolved. American family style two door sports coups with rear wheel drive are fitted with a large V8 engine to create this icon of muscle and speed. Distinct from the low, two seat, European sports cars, muscle cars are much more affordable.

Muscle cars are a quintessentially North American phenomenon, owing their outrageous existence to a very simple formula. Take a mid-size American sedan (nothing too complicated, upmarket, or fancy) then add the biggest, raunchiest V8 that is possible to squeeze under the hood and behold: the magnificent muscle car. Pontiac was first, with the legendary GTO. Ford followed with the invention of a new class of car with the pony car, the Mustang. Every other American manufacturer joined in the act after that, all wanting a cut of the action. Muscle cars are loud and proud. Look further into this fascinating book to discover the intoxicating world of these wonderful machines. Includes information on models, facts, and other interesting information on America's pride and joy; the legendary muscle car.

More than thirty years ago, Finn Murphy dropped out of college to become a long-haul trucker. Since then he's covered more than a million miles packing, loading, and hauling people's belongings all over America. Known by his trucker handle as U-Turn, he spends his days (and many of his nights) in a 53-foot eighteen-wheeler he calls Cassidy.

In The Long Haul, Murphy offers a trucker's-eye view of America on the move. Going far beyond the myth of the American road trip, he whisks readers down the I-95 Powerlane, across the Florida Everglades, in and out of the truck stops of the Midwest, and through the steep grades of the Rocky Mountains. As he crisscrosses the country, Murphy recounts with wit, candor, and charm the America he has seen change over the decades, from the hollowing-out of small towns to changing tastes in culture and home furnishings.

Through it all, Murphy tells poignant, funny, and often haunting stories of the people he encounters on the job: a feisty hoarder in New Hampshire; a Virginia homeowner raging when Murphy's truck accidentally runs down a stand of trees; an ex-banker in Colorado who treats Finn and his crew with undisguised contempt; a widow who needs Murphy to bring her archeologist husband's remains and relics to a Navajo burial ceremony in New Mexico. These experiences inspire Finn's memorable reflections on work, class, and the bonds we form with the things we own and the places we live.

Brimming with personality and filled with great characters, The Long Haul is a resonant portrait of the enduring appeal of manual labor in the dark underbelly of the American Dream.

A brilliant blend of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The Orchid Thief, Earl Swift's wise, funny, and captivating Auto Biography follows an outlaw auto dealer as he struggles to save a rusted '57 Chevy--a car that has already passed through twelve pairs of hands before his--while financial ruin, government bureaucrats and the FBI close in on him.

Slumped among hundreds of other decrepit hulks on a treeless, windswept moor in eastern North Carolina, the Chevy evokes none of the Jet Age mystique that made it the most beloved car to ever roll off an assembly line. It's open to the rain. Birds nest in its seats. Officials of the surrounding county consider it junk.

To Tommy Arney, it's anything but: It's a fossil of the twentieth-century American experience, of a place and a people utterly devoted to the automobile and changed by it in myriad ways. It's a piece of history--especially so because its flaking skin conceals a rare asset: a complete provenance, stretching back more than fifty years.

So, hassled by a growing assortment of challengers, the Chevy's thirteenth owner--an orphan, grade-school dropout and rounder, a felon arrested seventy-odd times, and a man who's been written off as a ruin himself--embarks on a mission to save the car and preserve long record of human experience it carries in its steel and upholstery.

Written for both gearheads and Sunday drivers, Auto Biography charts the shifting nature of the American Dream and our strange and abiding relationship with the automobile, through an iconic classic and an improbable, unforgettable hero.

The history of flight attendants, their tasks, attire, mystique, and eventual legal rights are told in this slightly oversized (9.25x11) volume. Much of the book is filled with historic advertisements and promotional photos of airlines worldwide, though US airlines are the predominant focus. Anno