Sublime

Years later, after Grove had learned to appreciate this, he read Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management, which described the ideal chief executive as an outside person, an inside person, and a person of action. Grove realized that instead of being embodied in one person, such traits could exist in a leadership team. That was the case at Intel,

Our management policy, as the 1942 annual report formally stated it, “has evolved from the belief that the most effective results and the maximum progress and stability of the business are achieved by placing its executives in the same relative position, so far as possible, that they would occupy if they were conducting a business on their own acco

Far from being the legendary crisp man of decision, Mr. Sloan was, when he chose to be, a master of ambivalence. He had described himself remarkably well in his testimony in the Du Pont suit: "It is generally my custom, when I get some resistance, to back out of it and try to do a selling job rather than to force the issue." And he said:

With the obvious exception of his single-purpose goal of a cheap car for the masses, a set policy was next to impossible with him. It was impossible because by nature he was an experimenter.

Progress was made, too, in stabilizing employment. But the problem of keeping production at a stable level is still unsolved today and very likely will remain so, owing in part to the incompletely solved problem of forecasting sales in the uncertain future. Other problems — the variations in the level of demand, both cyclical and seasonal, and the

So strongly did I feel about the situation that, when someone proposed making changes in Buick’s management, where Harry Bassett was successfully carrying on Walter Chrysler’s old policy, I wrote to Mr. du Pont: “It is far better that the rest of General Motors be scrapped than any chances taken with Buick’s earning power.”

These three emergency problems — overruns on appropriations, inventory runaway, and the resulting cash shortage — exposed the lack of control and coordination in the corporation. It was in the effort to meet these specific emergency problems that new methods of financial coordination and control were developed in General Motors. Financial method is

General Motors was founded in 1908, the same year the Model T was launched. Its founder, William C. Durant, had made a fortune in carriagemaking and decided to move into cars. He established GM as a holding company and immediately acquired Buick, a carmaker he already controlled, followed by a string of other carmakers, including Oakland, Oldsmobil