My Years With General Motors

There will always be some conflict between the figure men and the salesmen, since the salesmen naturally think they can do something about a statistical situation, as they often can. I got in the middle here — between Mr. Brown and the divisions — as I often did in the presence of conflicting representations of reality.

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

His precious volume, which was the foundation of his position, was fast disappearing. He could not continue losing sales and maintain his profits. And so, for engineering and market reasons, the Model T fell. And yet not many observers expected so catastrophic and almost whimsical a fall as Mr. Ford chose to take in May 1927 when he shut down his g

We have not bought our way into operations, we have built them up.

[It] Enables the Corporation to direct the placing of additional capital where it will result in the greatest benefit to the Corporation as a whole.

When first-car buyers returned to the market for the second round, with the old car as a first payment on the new car, they were selling basic transportation and demanding something more than that in the new car. Middle-income buyers, assisted by the trade-in and installment financing, created the demand, not for basic transportation, but for progr

Essentially it was a matter of making things visible. The unique thing was that it made possible the creation, based on experience, of detailed standards or yardsticks for working-capital and fixed-capital requirements and for the various elements of costs.

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

Both created great and lasting institutions. They were of a generation of what I might call personal types of industrialists; that is, they injected their personalities, their “genius”, so to speak, as a subjective factor into their operations without the discipline of management by method and objective facts. Their organizational methods, however,