A new book argues that we’ve forgotten the importance of how we make things
We live in a world where manufacturing is both everywhere and invisible. Tim Minshall’s Your Life is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better (Faber, 2025) sets out to make it visible again.
Minshall, a Cambridge professor of innovation, is well placed to tackle the task. He writes with clarity and curiosity, offering a wide-ranging tour through the systems and infrastructures that underpin modern life. The book’s first achievement is to reframe manufacturing. For Minshall, it is not simply about factories and assembly lines, but about transforming inputs into outputs through people, process and ingenuity. A blacksmith, a hospital “making healthy people,” and a gigafactory producing batteries all fit his broad frame. This perspective matters: it reminds us that manufacturing is not a relic of the past, but the enduring foundation of prosperity, innovation and community.
Minshall also challenges the outdated image of the factory as grim and low status. Factory jobs often pay above the national average, provide skilled careers and anchor local economies. Switzerland and Singapore – global leaders in manufacturing – show how closely it is linked to innovation and resilience. Ignore manufacturing, Minshall suggests, and we risk losing sight of the very driver of long-term growth.
The book’s most compelling sections explore globalization and its discontents. Cheap shipping and hyper-specialization have produced supply chains that are economically efficient, but dangerously fragile. Minshall illustrates this with vivid stories: Scottish fish sent to China for filleting before returning to UK supermarkets; the chaos caused by a single container ship blocking the Suez Canal; the vulnerabilities exposed by Covid-19. His point is not that self-sufficiency is the answer, but that disconnection from production leaves societies exposed in crises, weakens innovation, and worsens environmental damage.
Sustainability runs throughout the book. Manufacturing, as it stands, is harming the planet. Yet Minshall highlights promising countertrends: the circular economy, product-as-a-service models, digital twins that allow safer and leaner design, and the use of real-time data to drive efficiency. He treats more radical ideas, like “net-positive” manufacturing that actually improves the environment, with caution, recognizing them as aspirational rather than imminent.
His skepticism extends to the notion of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. While some hail robotics, AI and the Internet of Things as a fundamental break with the past, Minshall argues that manufacturing change is typically incremental, fragmented and uneven. History suggests we only recognize such revolutions in retrospect. Executives should resist chasing buzzwords and rather plan for steady, long-term adaptation.
The book is full of sharp details. Virtually all the switches in the world’s kettles are made on the Isle of Man; slowing container ships by 20% could cut their carbon emissions by a third. This makes the abstract tangible, and illustrates how small shifts can create large impacts. Yet Minshall is clear that progress toward cleaner, smarter, more resilient manufacturing is happening too slowly to meet urgent environmental challenges.
If the book has a limitation, it is that it leans heavily on market-driven solutions, giving less attention to the political action that may be required to accelerate change. Those seeking a critique of government and regulation might look elsewhere.
Nevertheless, Your Life is Manufactured is an important contribution. It reminds us that every object we use embodies a story of transformation, and that how we manufacture will shape not only economies, but communities and the planet itself.
Piers Cain is a management consultant
