To economize we coordinated to a greater extent our work in purchasing, design, production, and selling, and some of these changes were of lasting value.

My responsibility involved the application of financial method, for finance could not exist in a vacuum but had to be integrated with operations.

Change, as I have often said, means challenge, and the ability to meet challenge is the sign of good management.

Mr. Chrysler was a man of high ambition and imagination. He was a practical man with broad capabilities; his genius I think was in the organization of automobile production. Like Mr. Nash, he recognized the opportunity offered by the young and promising automobile business. They both were true leaders of its early development and became heads of gr

The real problem was to forecast how many cars we could expect to sell. It was in an effort to make the sales forecasts as accurate as possible that we put the responsibility for them directly on the division managers, since they were closer to the consumer and therefore the most likely to be well informed on sales trends.

Our decentralized organization and our tradition of selling ideas, rather than simply giving orders, impose the need upon all levels of management to make a good case for what they propose.

Every enterprise needs a concept of its industry. There is a logical way of doing business in accordance with the facts and circumstances of an industry, if you can figure it out. If there are different concepts among the enterprises involved, these concepts are likely to express competitive forces in their most vigorous and most decisive form.

By various means, mainly exchanges of stock, Mr. Durant between 1908 and 1910 brought into General Motors about twenty-five companies. Eleven were automobile companies; two were electrical-lamp companies, and the remainder were auto parts and accessory manufacturers. Of the automobile companies, only four, Buick, Olds (now Oldsmobile), Oakland (now

Unlike most early motorcar producers, who merely assembled components made by the parts manufacturers, Mr. Durant already had Buick making many of its own parts, and he expected to bring about increasing economies in this direction.