Sublime

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

To set the scene, let me divide the history of the automobile, from a commercial standpoint, into three periods. There was the period before 1908, which with its expensive cars was entirely that of a class market; then the period from 1908 to the mid-twenties, which was dominantly that of a mass market, ruled by Ford and his concept of basic transp

By 1920 its lineup ranged from Chevrolet at the low end through Oakland and Olds, Scripps-Booth and Sheridan, to Buick and Cadillac at the top. But GM’s product lineup, having been assembled through acquisition, was a shambles. There was lots of overlap between brands in the middle of the range, while the lowest-price car was too expensive (the che

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

Mr. Sloan's genius, as far as I could see, was in a complex of corporate arrangements and activities; his skill was in the internal strategies of the automobile industry and in the market: He could hold that industry, so to speak, in the palm of his hand.

policy which we defined simply as “a car for every purse and purpose”.

The product policy we proposed is the one for which General Motors has now long been known. We said first that the corporation should produce a line of cars in each price area, from the lowest price up to one for a strictly high-grade quantity-production car, but we would not get into the fancy-price field with small production; second, that the pr

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