The air-cooled engine offered an attractive prospect. It would get rid of the cumbersome radiator and plumbing system of the water-cooled engine and promised to reduce the number of parts in the engine, its weight, and its cost, and at the same time to improve engine performance. If it fulfilled all these promises it would indeed revolutionize the

In some organizations, in order to tap the potentialities of a genius, it is necessary to build around him and tailor the organization to his temperament. General Motors on the whole is not such an organization although Mr. Kettering was an obvious exception.

Out of this process comes a winnowing of techniques and ideas, and a development of judgments and skills. The quality of General Motors’ management as a whole derives in part from this shared experience with common goals and from divisional rivalry within the framework of these common goals.

I have always taken a strong stand for the shareholder, especially in such matters as representation on the board of directors and its committees, and the payment of dividends. Yet I have also considered myself as one of the breed that we now call the “executive”. Management has been my specialization. On many occasions when I was chief executive

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

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.

I came of age at almost exactly the time when the automobile business in the United States came into being.

Much is to be gained through a similar coordination of sales activities. I think that we, in General Motors, have all got to recognize that the “neck of the bottle” is going to be the sales end. This is perfectly natural in any industry; it eventually gets down to the sales end, and certainly the automotive industry is beginning to reach that

The franchise system of distribution makes sense only if you have a group of sound, prosperous dealers as business associates. I have never been interested in business relationships that are not of benefit to all concerned. It is my belief that everyone should hold up his end of the relationship and be rewarded accordingly. The significance of the