Barry C. Lynn

Time and again, human beings have learned to build buffers into complex systems. We design compartments into our ships, circuit breakers into our electrical networks and minimum reserve requirements for our banks. Yet since the cold war era, we have done the exact opposite with our industrial system. Rather than conceive market-friendly methods to distribute risk and dampen shocks, we devoted ourselves to eliminating the bulkheads that have traditionally existed between nations and between companies. To evoke a more raw… more

Selected reviews of End of the Line are featured below:

Tuesday, August 16, 2005 The problem with globalized outsourcing, former Global Business executive editor Lynn warns, is that "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere," as when a 2003 earthquake in Taiwan halted semiconductor manufacturing for a week, negatively affecting American electronics firms. National security, he argues, is jeopardized by this "hyperspecialized and hyper-rigid production system" as well; for Lynn, until the NAFTA-izing Bill Clinton came… more

The long-festering spat between Boeing and Airbus has been dumped back onto the World Trade Organisation in a fight that promises to be expensive, some say foolish. A more apt description might be "dangerously anachronistic". The twin revolutions of globalisation and outsourcing have so altered the business of manufacturing jetliners that the coming clash in Geneva is unlikely to benefit either company -- or, for that matter, citizens on either side of the Atlantic.

If the fight sounds familiar, it… more

According to Forrester Research, nearly 4,000 white-collar jobs are leaving the U.S. a week for low-cost locales. McKinsey & Co. forecast the U.S., Europe, and Japan combined lose 600,000 of these jobs a year. In the late 1990s, science and engineering accounted for 5% of U.S. undergraduate degrees; in China, they accounted for 73%. Intel Chairman Andy Grove recently posed the question, "Do we have the national will to take productive action? When the problem becomes… more

When President Bush unveiled his plans for a hydrogen-powered car in his State of the Union address in January, he proposed $1.2 billion in spending to develop a revolutionary automobile that will be "pollution-free." The new vehicle, he declared, will rely on "a simple chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen" to power a car "producing only water, not exhaust fumes." Within 20 years, the president vowed, fuel-cell cars will "make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent… more

You can buy a plastic-bound copy of the Venezuelan Constitution for 60 cents, a leather-clad copy for $3, a coffee-table edition for $5. Not that you really need a copy of your own, since someone standing near you on the subway in Caracas will have one in his pocket. Or you can always listen to one of the ongoing debates at a downtown park. "Look at this article," someone will shout, and a half dozen people will flip through the… more

When Robert Mao describes the fantastic manufacturing opportunities his company sees in China, he speaks with mixed feelings. "For the first time in the modern era," he marvels, "we have an inexhaustible reservoir of good, trainable labor." But Mao, who as president and CEO of Nortel Networks China has worked in the region for 20 years, also worries about what that means for China's neighbors. For the foreseeable future, he says, almost all new investment by Nortel suppliers will go… more

Paul Veryser's steel-parts company, Stampings Inc., is in big trouble. Tariffs on steel imports, imposed by President George W. Bush in March, have pushed the cost of steel up by more than half on the American spot market, and this has added a whopping 25 percent to the cost of the air-bag, seat-belt and steering-wheel assembly parts his company makes.

The higher costs wouldn't be so bad if the Fraser, Mich.-based company could pass them on to its customers,… more