Bill Gates told Fortune, "My Years with General Motors is probably the best book to read if you want to read only one book about business."
Alfred P. Sloan was the control stockholder of General Motors Corporation. General Motors was the largest industrial company in the world. General Motors was larger than almost all of the other countries of the world.
The man who helped build the world's largest industrial corporation - and created the organizational system that has made it run as efficiently and effectively as any organization in the world - tells the remarkable story of how General Motors evolved.
When Alfred P. Sloan joined General Motors in 1918, it was a sprawling loosely organized country headed towards severe financial and mismanagement crisis. Two years later, after the resignation of President and founder W. C. Durant, Mr. Sloan and the du Ponts assumed management responsibility and began to develop the delicate balance between centralized operational responsibility that has made General Motors competitive in policy as well as in product.
In Part I Mr. Sloan describes the evolution of the company's basic management policies and strategic concepts: the organizational policy, the concept of financial control, and the product policy which revolutionized the automobile market long dominated by Henry Ford's Model T. In the early 1920s Mr. Sloan recognized the importance of offering the public "a car for every purse and purpose" and of upgrading cars for an increasingly prosperous, consumer oriented society. Part II takes the reader behind the scenes into many operating phases of the corporation: its specialized staffs, non-automotive divisions, and specific management problems. Mr. Sloan's vivid narrative is illuminated with lively quotations from the record as he describes some of the most dramatic events in American industrial history. This is the authentic inside story of how modern management techniques enabled General Motors to triumph in the roaring 20s and emerge strong from the depression 30s; to convert slowly to war production in the 40s and go on to break all records for production, sales, and profits in the 50s and 60s.
My Years With General Motors is the story no other businessman could tell - a distillation of half a century of intimate experience with the largest industrial complex in the world, It is a story of ideas as well as events. Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., was born in 1875 and graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology at twenty. Four year later he was general manager of the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company, and when Hyatt was combined with several other automotive suppliers to form the United Motors Corporation Mr. Sloan was named president of the new company. In 1918 United Motors became a part of General Motors, and Mr. Sloan joined G. M. as a director and vice president. He was made president and chief executive officer in 1923 and was elected board chairman in 1937. Mr. Sloan has been honorary chairman since 1956. He founded and has endowed the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, of which he is chairman, and was co-founder of the Sloan- Kettering Institute for Cancer Research.
