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

Mr. Durant was a great man with a great weakness — he could create but not administer — and he had, first in carriages and then in automobiles, more than a quarter century of the glory of creation before he fell.

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

We started not with the actual corporation but with a model of a corporation, for which we said we would state policy standards. Our aim we said was to chart the true best course for the future operations of this model corporation, recognizing that present actual conditions necessitated sailing off the recommended course temporarily until it became

Now what did this tale of internal conflict over statistics come down to? Essentially it was a matter of statistical controls versus salesmanship, which was brought to a head in 1924 by a recession in the general economy following directly upon the boom year of 1923.

As to organization, we did not have adequate knowledge or control of the individual operating divisions. It was a management by crony, with the divisions operating on a horse-trading basis.

The figure man in this instance was right and the salesmen were wrong. Everywhere the inventories were excessive. I then issued one of the few flat orders I ever gave to the division managers during the time I served as chief executive officer of General Motors. This order directed all division managers to curtail production schedules immediately —