I'm an enthusiastic reader of Construction Physics, the blog by Brian Potter. The art direction is first-class, and I love the deep dives on metals, industrial processes, construction, and more. This book by Potter dissects how industrial products can become faster and cheaper by things like continuous manufacturing, the kanban method, design for manufacturing, and lots of other interesting methodologies.
I wish I liked it more. Partly because this book was a gift, but also I could see the brilliance in it, but the style and the adaptation to longform didn't work for me. It felt like instead of structuring around a narrative, concrete examples, or a constructive philosophy, each chapter flipped through each in succession. I enjoyed the concrete examples, but those weren't the meat of the book. The theory was interesting but I felt like it kept repeating itself and stating the obvious. I wanted to get pulled in but this took me a long time to read.
This was mostly apolitical, though it has two asterisks: The first, Potter's affiliation with the Institute for Progress, which is a centrist, somewhat anti-regulatory thinktank. The second, it's published by Stripe Press, the unbelievably well-funded and well-designed passion project of Patrick and John Collison, brothers and cofounders of Stripe. They've got a little media network that also includes Works in Progress magazine. When the alternative is the ghoulish a16z media network, it's easy to appreciate something more balanced, but there's a pretty clear pro-markets, anti-regulation tilt to most of the content - though I wouldn't know if the publisher has any influence on the text in this case.