Product Description

He’s an American legend, a straight-shooting businessman who brought Chrysler back from the brink and in the process became a media celebrity, newsmaker, and a man many had urged to run for president.

The son of Italian immigrants, Lee Iacocca rose spectacularly through the ranks of Ford Motor Company to become its president, only to be toppled eight years later in a power play that should have shattered him. But Lee Iacocca didn’t get mad, he got even. He led a battle for Chrysler’s survival that made his name a symbol of integrity, know-how, and guts for millions of Americans.

In his classic hard-hitting style, he tells us how he changed the automobile industry in the 1960s by creating the phenomenal Mustang. He goes behind the scenes for a look at Henry Ford’s reign of intimidation and manipulation. He recounts the miraculous rebirth of Chrysler from near bankruptcy to repayment of its $1.2 billion government loan so early that Washington didn’t know how to cash the check.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57200 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-03
• Released on: 2007-04-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author
Lee Iacocca is the former chairman of Chrysler Corporation and the author of Talking Straight and the autobiography Iacocca.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One


THE FAMILY

Nicola Iacocca, my father, arrived in this country in 1902 at the age of twelve--poor, alone, and scared. He used to say the only thing he was sure of when he got here was that the world was round. And that was only because another Italian boy named Christopher Columbus had preceded him by 410 years, almost to the day.

As the boat sailed into New York Harbor, my father looked out and saw the Statue of Liberty, that great symbol of hope for millions of immigrants. On his second crossing, when he saw the statue again, he was a new American citizen--with only his mother, his young wife, and hope by his side. For Nicola and Antoinette, America was the land of freedom--the freedom to become anything you wanted to be, if you wanted it bad enough and were willing to work for it.

This was the single lesson my father gave to his family. I hope I have done as well with my own.When I was growing up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, our family was so close it sometimes felt as if we were one person with four parts.

My parents always made my sister, Delma, and me feel important and special. Nothing was too much work or too much trouble. My father might have been busy with a dozen other things, but he always had time for us. My mother went out of her way to cook the foods we loved--just to make us happy. To this day, whenever I come to visit, she still makes my two favorites--chicken soup with little veal meatballs, and ravioli stuffed with ricotta cheese. Of all the world's great Neopolitan cooks, she has to be one of the best.

My father and I were very close. I loved pleasing him, and he was always terrifically proud of my accomplishments. If I won a spelling contest at school, he was on top of the world. Later in life whenever I got a promotion, I'd call my father right away and he'd rush out to tell all his friends. At Ford, each time I brought out a new car, he wanted to be the first to drive it. In 1970, when I was named president of the Ford Motor Company, I don't know which of us was more excited.

Like many native Italians, my parents were very open with their feelings and their love--not only at home, but also in public. Most of my friends would never hug their fathers. I guess they were afraid of not appearing strong and independent. But I hugged and kissed my dad at every opportunity--nothing could have felt more natural.

He was a restles and inventive man who was always trying new things. At one point, he bought a couple of fig trees and actually found a way to grow them in the harsh climate of Allentown. He was also the first person in town to buy a motorcycle--an old Harley Davidson, which he rode through the dirt streets of our small city. Unfortunately, my father and his motorcycle didn't get along too well. He fell off it so often that he finally got rid of it. As a result, he never again trusted any vehicle with less than four wheels.

Because of that damn motorcycle, I wasn't allowed to have a bicycle when I was growing up. Whenever I wanted to ride a bike, I had to borrow one from a friend. On the other hand, my father let me drive a car as soon as I turned sixteen. This made me the only kid in Allentown who went straight from a tricycle to a Ford.

My father loved cars. In fact, he owned one of the first Model T's. He was one of the few people in Allentown who knew how to drive, and he was always tinkering with cars and thinking about how to improve them. Like every driver in those days, he used to get a lot of flat tires. For years he was obsessed with finding a way to drive a few extra miles with a flat. To this day, whenever there's a new development in tire technology, I always think of my father.

He was in love with America, and he pursued the American dream with all his might. When World War I broke out, he volunteered for the Army--partly out of patriotism, and partly, he admitted to me later, to have a little more control over his destiny. He had worked hard to get to America and to become naturalized, and he was terrified at the prospect of being sent back to Europe to fight in Italy or France. Luckily for him, he was stationed at Camp Crane, an army training center just a couple of miles from his home. Because he could drive, he was assigned to train ambulance drivers.Nicola Iacocca had come to America from San Marco, about twenty-five miles northeast of Naples in the Italian province of Campania. Like so many immigrants, he was full of ambition and hope. In America he lived briefly in Garrett, Pennsylvania, with his stepbrother. There my father went to work in a coal mine, but he hated it so much that he quit after one day. He liked to say it was the only day in his life that he ever worked for anybody else.

He soon moved east to Allentown, where he had another brother. By 1921, he had saved up enough money doing odd jobs, mostly as an apprentice shoemaker, that he could return to San Marco to bring over his widowed mother. As it turned out, he ended up bringing over my mother, too. During his stay in Italy this thirty-one-year-old bachelor fell in love with the seventeen-year-old daughter of a shoemaker. Within a few weeks they were married.

Over the years a number of journalists have reported (or repeated) that my parents went to Lido Beach in Venice for their honeymoon and that I was named Lido to commemorate that happy week. It's a wonderful story, except for one problem: it's not true. My father did take a trip to Lido Beach, but it was before the wedding, not after. And since he was with my mother's brother at the time, I doubt that his vacation was very romantic.

My parents' voyage to American wasn't easy. My mother came down with typhoid fever and spent the entire trip in the ship's infirmary. By the time they reached Ellis Island, she had lost all her hair. According to the laws, she should have been sent back to Italy. But my father was an aggressive, fast-talking operator who had already learned how to manage in the New World. Somehow he was able to convince the immigration officials that his new bride was merely seasick.

I was born three years later, on October 15, 1924. By this time, my father had opened a hot-dog restaurant called the Orpheum Wiener House. It was the perfect business for somebody without much cash. All he really needed to get started were a grill, a bun warmer, and a few stools.

My father always drilled two things into me: never get into a capital-intensive business, because the bankers will end up owning you. (I should have paid more attention to this particular piece of advice!) And when times are tough, be in the food business, because no matter how bad things get, people still have to eat. The Orpheum Wiener House stayed afloat all through the Great Depression.

Later, he brought my uncles Theodore and Marco into the business. To this day, Theodore's sons, Julius and Albert Iacocca, are still making hot dogs in Allentown. The company is called Yocco's, which is more or less how the Pennsylvania Dutch used to pronounce our name.

I came pretty close to going into the food business myself. At one point in 1952, I seriously considered leaving Ford to go into food franchising. Ford dealerships operated as independent franchises, and it occurred to me that anyone who could franchise a food operation would get rich in a hurry. My plan was to have ten fast-food outlets with one central buying location. This was long before McDonald's was even a gleam in Ray Kroc's eye, and I sometimes wonder if I missed my true calling in life. Who knows? Maybe today I'd be worth half a billion dollars, with a sign out front proclaiming: Over 10 billion served.

A few years later, I did open my own place, a little sandwich shop in Allentown called The Four Chefs. It served Philadelphia cheese steaks. (That's thinly-sliced steak with melted cheese on an Italian roll.) My father set it up, and I put in the money. It did very well--too well, in fact, because what I really needed was a tax shelter. We made $125,000 the first year, which raised my tax bracket to the point where I had to get rid of it. The Four Chefs was my first exposure to bracket creep and the progressive nature of our tax laws.

Actually I was in the food business long before I got involved with cars. When I was ten, one of the country's first supermarkets opened in Allentown. After school and on weekends, my little pals and I would line up at the door with our red wagons, like a row of taxicabs outside a hotel. As the shoppers came out, we would offer to take home their bags for a small tip. In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense--I was in the transportation end of the food business.

As a teenager, I had a weekend job in a fruit market run by a Greek named Jimmy Kritis. I used to get up before dawn to get to the wholesale market and bring back the produce. He paid me $2.00 a day--plus all the fruit and vegetables I could lug home after a sixteen-hour workday.

By this time, my father had other enterprises besides the Orpheum Wiener House. Early on, he bought into a national company called U-Drive-It, one of the very first car rental agencies. Eventually he built up a fleet of about thirty cars, mostly Fords. My father was also good friends with one Charley Charles, whose son, Edward Charles, worked for a Ford dealership. Later Eddie bought a dealership of his own, where he introduced me to the fascinating world of the retail car business. By the time I was fifteen, Eddie had convinced me to go into the automobile business. From that day forward, all my energies were directed to doing just that.

My father is probably responsible for my instinct for marketing. He owned a couple of movie houses; one of his theaters, the Franklin, is still in use today. Old-timers in Allentown have told me my father was such a great promoter that the kids who came down to the Saturday matinees used to get more excited about his special offers than about the movies. People still talk about the day he announced that the ten kids with the dirtiest faces would be admitted free.

I doubt...

Customer Reviews

On Lee...
I opted to read this book out of curiosity on how Lee lead Chrysler the way that he did; I was also surprised to learn about his beginnings with FORD. This book is a sort of "in your face" look at how management and leadership worked at both Chrysler and Ford to bring about successes. If you're in management or a leadership role, this book makes for good reading, and you may find yourself referring back to periodically--I have. There are some excellent points that remain quite valid in today's corporate environment. I think that Iacocca's comment: "Good leaders know how to follow their people.", says a lot about one's role in a leadership capacity, and what a good leader should be capable of. Good leaders should lead, but they should also know when to listen to their people. This book is a keeper!

Words to Live By!
Iacocca, an Autobiography, by Lee Iacocca with William Novak

A few concepts and quotes stayed with me from this book:

Every Sunday Lee would make a list of what it is he wanted to accomplish in the upcoming week.

"I began my life as the son of immigrants and I worked my way up to the president of the Ford Motor Company. When I finally got there, I was on top of the world. But then fate said to me: "Wait. We're not finished with you. Now your going to find out what it feels like to get kicked off Mt. Everest!"

"As you go through life, there are thousands of little forks in the road, and there are a few really big forks-those moments of reckoning, moments of truth. This was mine as I wondered what to do."

"There are times in everyone's life when something constructive is born out of adversity. There are times when things seem so bad that you've got to grab your fate by the shoulders and shake it."

""Don't get mad," Mary reminded me. "Get Even" In times of great stress and adversity, it's always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive"

His father would tell him, "You've got to accept a little sorrow in life. You'll never know what happiness is unless you have something to compare it to."

"The most important thing I learned in school was how to communicate. Miss Raber, our ninth grade teacher...would quiz us on the Word Power Game from Readers Digest. Without any advance warning she'd rip it out the magazine and make us take the vocabulary test. It became a powerful habit with me-to this day I still look for the list of words in every issue of the Digest"

"Setbacks are a natural part of life, and you've got to be careful of how you respond with them."

The book talks about how Lee rose through the ranks at Ford as well as his beliefs and strategies that he has picked up through the years. If you want to learn and grow, read about leaders, and people that have overcome adversities.

By Kevin Kingston, author of, "A 20,000% Gain in Real Estate"

(...)

1965 Mustang
August 1946, Iacocca goes to work at Ford as a student engineer. A group of students were assigned too the River Rouge plant, the largest manufacturing complex in the world. Iacocca loses interest in Engineering and fails to complete his 18-month training. Iacocca switches to Sales and marketing and makes a connection with Frank Zimmerman. In 1949, Iacocca becomes a zone manager in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvannia and trains eighteen dealers. 1953, Iacocca becomes assistant sales manager of the Philadelphia district and he promotes padded dashboards as a safety feature. In 1956, Iacocca buys his first new car and creates the idea "56 for 56" meaning $56 a month for 56 monthes. McNamara takes notice and uses the idea to sale an additional 75,000 cars. Sept 29,1956, Iacocca marries Mary McCleary at St Robert's Catholic Church. 1960, Charlie Beacham bring Iacocca to Dearborn as his national truck marketing manager. Dec 1960, Iacocca becomes head of the Ford division.

Manager Qualities: The qualities that make a good manager are decisiveness. "You have to bring all the information together, setup a time table, and act." "Life is about timing." "When you speak to a group have a prepared text" and deviate from the prepared text whenever you feel the need. The best way to develop ideas is through interacting with your fellow managers. "I'm a believer in executives spending time together talking - not always in formal meeting but simply shooting the breeze, helping each other out, and solving problems." "The biggest problem facing American business today is that most managers have too much information. It dazzles them, and they don't know what to do with it all. The key too success is not information. It's people."

Mustang: Jan 1964, the decision was made to hold the price of the Mustang under $2,500. The Mustang sold for $2,368. The price was reasonable. The first quarter of 1964 hit the highest sales in Ford history. The Mustang was a hit and during the first week, four million visited Ford dealerships. The Mustang resembled the European racing that American car buffs found appealing with its Ferrari flair and openmouthed air scoop. "When the product is right, you don't have to be a great marketer." The Mustang sold 75,000 units in the first year. Customers were spending a $1,000 additional on options: white sidewall tires, radios, eight-cylinder engines, and automatic transmissions. In the first two years the Mustang had generated $1.1 billion in profits.