American Made

American manufacturing is on life supportat least that''s what most people think. The exodus of jobs to China and other foreign markets is irreversible and anything that is built here requires specialized skills the average worker couldn''t hope to gain. Not so says Dan DiMicco chairman and former CEO of Nucor America''s largest steel company. He not only revived a major US manufacturing firm during a recession but helped galvanize the flagging domestic steel industry when many of his competitors were in bankruptcy or headed overseas. In American Made he takes to task the politicians academics and political pundits who he contends are exacerbating fears and avoiding simple solutions for the sake of nothing more than their own careers and contrasts them with the postwar leaders who rebuilt Europe and Japan put a man on the moon and kept communism at bay. We need leaders of such resolve today he argues who can tackle a broken job-creation engine by restoring manufacturing to its central role in the U.S. economyand cease creating fictitious service businesses where jobs evaporate after a year or two as in a Ponzi scheme. . With his trademark bluntness DiMicco tackles the false promise of green jobs and the hidden costs of outsourcing. Along the way he shares the lessons he''s learned about good leadership crisis management and the true meaning of innovation and maps the road back to robust economic growth middle-class prosperity and American competitiveness.