My Years With General Motors

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

I see three simultaneous patterns in the way Mr. Durant set up General Motors. The first was variety in cars for a variety of tastes and economic levels in the market. That is evident in Buick, Olds, Oakland, Cadillac, and, later, Chevrolet. The second pattern was diversification, calculated, it seems, to cover the many possibilities in the enginee

At his urging, Hyatt was soon producing new antifriction bearings for automobiles. At age 24, he became the president of Hyatt, where he supervised all aspects of the company’s business. Hyatt bearings became a standard in the automobile industry, and the company grew rapidly under his leadership.

Some union spokesmen talk as though the entire benefits of increased productivity should go to labor. I do not believe that is sound. New machinery costs money and the additional investment must be justified by a return on that investment. An argument could be made that the consumer, and the economy as a whole, would benefit most if productivity in

The standard-volume costing concept permitted us to appraise and analyze our costs from one year to the next on a basis unaffected by changes in volume at a given plant capacity. Changes in these unit costs reflected changes only in wage rates, material costs, and operating efficiencies and were not affected by year-to-year changes in volume. Even

“When your competitors follow you, that’s the medal in business.”

I believe that such a plan properly developed gives the necessary balance between each Operation and the Corporation itself and will result in all the advantages of coordinated action where such action is of benefit in a broader way without in any sense limiting the initiative of independence of action of any component part of the group.

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 guiding principle was to make our standards difficult to achieve but possible to attain, which I believe is the most effective way of capitalizing on the initiative, resourcefulness, and capabilities of the operating personnel.