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

The problem for General Motors, as I saw it in 1922, was to get the advantages of volume by buying on general contracts such items as tires, steel, stationery, rags, batteries, blocks, acetylene, abrasives, and the like, and at the same time to permit the divisions to have control over their own affairs. In a preliminary memorandum I argued that co

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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

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Sloan turned GM into more than just a model for the car industry. His reorganization of the company ensured that day-to-day decisions were devolved to the managers of each division, but financial oversight was centralized, with each division reporting its results, and being allocated resources, in a standardized way. Just as Henry Ford had defined

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I was of two minds about Mr. Durant. I admired his automotive genius, his imagination, his generous human qualities, and his integrity. His loyalty to the enterprise was absolute. I recognized, as Mr. Raskob and Pierre S. du Pont had, that he had created and inspired the dynamic growth of General Motors. But I thought he was too casual in his ways

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My best friends are my critics. You say, “Why did I not develop a real successor?” Mr. Ford, like many men of his kind, never had a successor, they just can’t acknowledge that such a thing is possible. Was his son even a possible successor? This war program which he, Henry Ford, never entered into, and which he would not take the slightest interest

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