A Ghost's Memoir: The Making of Alfred P. Sloan's My Years with General Motors (The MIT Press)

From the inside the picture was not quite so good. Not only were we not competitive with Ford in the low-price field — where the big volume and substantial future growth lay — but in the middle, where we were concentrated with duplication, we did not know what we were trying to do except to sell cars which, in a sense, took volume from each other.

From the strategic standpoint at that time, however, the most dangerous gap in the list was that between the Chevrolet and the Olds. It was big enough to constitute a volume demand and thereby to accommodate, on top of Chevrolet, a competitor against whom we then had no counter. It was therefore an important gap to fill both offensively and defensi

With Ford in almost complete possession of the low-price field, it would have been suicidal to compete with him head on. No conceivable amount of capital short of the United States Treasury could have sustained the losses required to take volume away from him at his own game. The strategy we devised was to take a bite from the top of his position,

The product policy we proposed is the one for which General Motors has now long been known. We said first that the corporation should produce a line of cars in each price area, from the lowest price up to one for a strictly high-grade quantity-production car, but we would not get into the fancy-price field with small production; second, that the pr

The slump had the effect of showing up all kinds of weaknesses, as slumps usually do. General Motors in 1920 had enjoyed 17 percent of the U.S. car and truck market; in 1921 we were on our way down to 12 percent. Ford, on the other hand, was in the course of rising from 45 percent of the market in units in 1920 to 60 percent in 1921. In other words

By 1920 its lineup ranged from Chevrolet at the low end through Oakland and Olds, Scripps-Booth and Sheridan, to Buick and Cadillac at the top. But GM’s product lineup, having been assembled through acquisition, was a shambles. There was lots of overlap between brands in the middle of the range, while the lowest-price car was too expensive (the che

I should mention one other very important decision reached in 1940. We decided that General Motors should seek to perform the most complicated and difficult production assignments.