Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsDullish narrative but inspiring story
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 6, 2016
In 1996, two years into his first term, Mayor David Hollister of Lansing, Mich. was confronted with the sobering news that General Motors planned to close its area plant and move. In the late nineties, GM was responsible for 7,000 direct jobs, 20,000 jobs with community ties, and 50,000 statewide jobs in commerce, so calling this a potential catastrophe would not be exaggerating. However, Hollister refused to be daunted and reached out to other business leaders, including Edward Donovan, Municipal Government for GM. Together they would come up with, then implement a six-step strategic framework to find a way to keep GM. Successfully implementing this process meant coordinating and working with a number of groups, each with its own agenda, including business, labor, local and state government, citizens and community organizations. As it turned out - and is detailed in this book, the campaign was a stunning success: General Motors ultimately wound up building multiple state of the art manufacturing plants in Michigan. The "Second Shift" is the story of how this came about.
The Six Steps.
1. Identifying challenges
2. Partnering: i.e. building strong relationships between different groups (and political party lines)
3. Building: i.e. employing a willingness to be flexible and continually evaluate how effective the process is
4. Solving, i.e. engage in constant problem solving
5. Celebrating, i.e. mark successful milestones, both big and small
6. Persevering
One thing that struck me was how willing the various authors and people interviewed were willing to admit that in multiple places, it had not been a smooth journey. But a willingness to put aside past personal differences and focus on the real issues helped the players stay the course.
Thoughts: There were two things that got in my way of my absorption in this book. One was the exclamation points, which probably sounds like a nitpick, but there it was. The other was the repetition of blocks of text and quotes to the point I occasionally wondered if I was rereading a page. However, overall, a very inspiring true-life story. At one point, someone suggests that the six step model could effectively be used in Washington, D.C. And I couldn't help feeling they had a point.
