Order it from Amazon:
Client: Cummins Engine Company
Project/product: The Engine That Could

Cummins, the world's leading producer of diesel engines above 200 horsepower, hired us to research and write their 75th anniversary history. With business historian David B. Sicilia, we conducted more than 100 interviews, researched thousands of primary documents, and wrote a book that was published by the Harvard Business School Press.

This project led to several others, including a video based on the history and a history-oriented annual report insert.

Excerpt:
Clessie goes to Washington
The War Production Board called a meeting of the Industrial Liquid-Cooled Engine Advisory Committee in the second week of January 1943. At that meeting, the assembled gasoline and diesel engine manufacturers were told once again of the dire need to increase engine production. They were invited to select one of their own to serve as the WPB's diesel-engine consultant, whose job it would be to help the Board break existing production logjams. The group chose [Cummins Engine Company president] Clessie L. Cummins.

"WILL HEAD U.S. DIESEL OUTPUT," read the headline in the January 25, 1943 edition of the Columbus Evening Republican. The accompanying article suggested that Clessie had been chosen first because of his long experience in the diesel field, and second because the Engine Company recently had been awarded the Navy's prestigious "E" award, recognizing excellence in production. "As director of production," the article went on to say, "Mr. Cummins will have almost unlimited power."

Clessie later recalled in his autobiography that he "went to Washington to watch over an industry and to be watched, in turn, by my doctor." The latter certainly was true. By now, Clessie had experienced three serious bouts of his inner-ear ailment, which at its worst rendered him incapable of even standing up unassisted. (When Clessie suffered his second attack in San Francisco, passersby mistook him for a drunk.) But a Washington, D.C.-based doctor who had the same affliction—and also had Cummins H engines in his yacht—agreed to take the ailing inventor in his care.

For public consumption, Clessie cited the "splendid cooperation" received from the participating companies, who helped him tremendously in his task of "scheduling production of all diesel and gasoline engines, with the exception of aircraft engines." Privately, he had less kind things to say about the government. Speaking off-the-cuff to the advisory group in October 1943, nine months after his relocation to Washington, Clessie expressed frustration that had been building for many months. "For the first three months on the job as consultant I snooped around, learning all I could. I had no desk assigned to me for months. When someone in the Internal Combustion Branch was absent or attending conferences, I slid into their chairs . . . .

"The facts are indisputable," Clessie stated bluntly. "Either you must cut schedules back to meet material, or get us the material to meet schedule." But the WPB, which officially was supposed to "control production and the flow of material," was failing to do so. During a September meeting with his increasingly disgruntled colleagues, Clessie recommended that they collectively send a telegram to "Engine Charlie" Wilson, the General Motors executive who served as executive vice chairman of the WPB, "asking him to give us a hearing."

The steps Clessie had taken to circumvent the bureaucracy and help his industry were in many ways typical of his approach to business: unconventional, impulsive, and tolerant of risk. The fact that Wilson attended the October 1943 meeting and sat through Clessie's sweeping denouncement of his Board bespeaks the importance that the government assigned to engine production. And Clessie was not alone. Waukesha's president J.N. Delong complained about excessive paperwork. Hercules president Charles Balough bristled at the implication that his company might have exaggerated its capacity: "We have not oversold our own capacity, but can very definitely state that our difficulty in keeping to our schedule has been the result of the unfavorable material situation."

In the week following this hearing, government bureaucrats worked overtime trying to confirm or deny the comments made by Clessie and his peers. The bureaucrats admitted the problems of materials shortages and bad planning on the part of the government. But they also faulted the engine companies for doing precisely what Balough had denied they were doing. "The present practice of industry is to accept orders for deliveries considerably beyond any reasonable anticipation of capacity," said one summary report. "Evidence indicates that overloaded manufacturers are continually accepting additional business, and that, when such business is accepted for indefinite or unsatisfactory delivery dates, pressure quickly develops to expedite such orders at the expense of others."