Sublime

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

I therefore reactivated the Operations Committee and had placed on it all the general operating officers on the Executive Committee and the general managers of the principal divisions, thus making it the major point of regular contact between the two types of executives. The Operations Committee was not a policy-making body but a forum for the disc

General Motors had come to own the manufacturers of 70 percent of everything that went into its automobiles—and had become by far the world’s most integrated large business. It was this prototype keiretsu that gave General Motors the decisive advantage, both in cost and in speed, which made it within a few short years both the world’s largest and t

The figure man in this instance was right and the salesmen were wrong. Everywhere the inventories were excessive. I then issued one of the few flat orders I ever gave to the division managers during the time I served as chief executive officer of General Motors. This order directed all division managers to curtail production schedules immediately —

There are only two that I know of: either manufacturer-owned, manager-operated dealerships, or the selling of cars by anyone and everyone, as cigarettes are sold — with the manufacturer maintaining a system of service agencies. I look askance at either of these changes. I believe that the franchise system, which has long prevailed in the automobile

Attention thereupon was given not to the question of how to divide scarce investment funds but how to raise more money.

A distinction should be made between the expansion itself and the need for organization which grew out of it.

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.

Sorensen gained Henry Ford’s respect by translating Ford’s design concepts into wooden parts that could be seen and studied. Advancing rapidly, he was second in command of Piquette production by 1907.