Good Reads: American manufacturing, Apple's new CEO, and a father-son journey to meet two presidents

Manufacturing growth

Things may finally be looking up for US manufacturing, James Fallows argues in the December issue of The Atlantic. 

Even in its battered condition, the American manufacturing sector is still the largest in the world, but its share of the US economy has declined from 20 percent in the early 1980s to just over 10 percent today. In the process, many high-paying jobs moved to China and other lower-wage countries, while Rust Belt communities in the United States were hard hit.

Two trends are likely to get trade winds blowing toward America again, Mr. Fallows contends. First, new technologies emerging in the US, such as 3-D printing, make it easier and faster to design, build, and refine products. Three-dimensional printing allows firms to use computerized molding systems to produce prototypes in minutes or hours. “A revolution is coming to the creation of things, comparable to the Internet’s effect on the creation and dissemination of ideas,” one industrial design expert told Fallows.

At the same time, tumultuous changes in China are reducing its manufacturing advantages, complicating life for outsourcers and exporters. “In China, wages are rising, workers are becoming choosier, public resistance to environmental devastation is growing, and the Chinese ‘investment led’ model is showing strain,” Fallows says. 

Apple’s new CEO

Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook talked extensively about management and corporate creativity in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel.

Mr. Cook succeeded Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs. Mr. Jobs was a major shareholder in the Walt Disney Company and had seen how executives there wasted time trying to figure out what Disney himself would have done after the founder of the company had passed away. Jobs “removed a tremendous burden for me,” Cook says, by instructing, “I never want you to ask what I would have done. Just do what is right.”

Apple has taken heat for poor working conditions at massive Foxconn Technology Group factories in China where many of its products are assembled. Cook told Businessweek that Apple would start producing one line of its Mac computers in the US in 2013 – a modest sign of the brightening prospects for US manufacturing mentioned above.

Creativity, in Cook’s definition, is “people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it.” He laughed about corporate innovation departments saying that having one “is always a sign that something is wrong ... you know, put a for sale sign on the door.”

1 | 2

Next