What books would an industrial engineer find it to be useful?
Henry Petroski wrote a number of books about engineering and design. His book To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design is a classic. James Gordon is a very readable author on the subjects of materials (The New Science of Strong Materials or Why You Don’t Fall through the Floor) and structures (Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down) Your friend might also like Honda: The Man and His Machines although, to be honest, I haven’t read it.
A moment’s thought reminds me that your friend might be the perfect reader for one of my favorite obscure books: The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, which provides a wonderful historical survey of the problem. To crib the product description at Amazon: James Beniger traces the origin of the Information Society to major economic and business crises of the past century. In the United States, applications of steam power in the early 1800s brought a dramatic rise in the speed, volume, and complexity of industrial processes, making them difficult to control. Scores of problems arose: fatal train wrecks, misplacement of freight cars for months at a time, loss of shipments, inability to maintain high rates of inventory turnover. Inevitably the Industrial Revolution, with its ballooning use of energy to drive material processes, required a corresponding gr
