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

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

He married Irene Jackson of Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1898 but he and his wife had no children. He had few, if any, hobbies, didn’t enjoy sports (though he owned a yacht once), didn’t smoke, rarely drank, and was content to simply watch television after dinner. His sole passion was the General Motors Corporation, and since he believed that his com

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

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

Mr. Chrysler was a man of high ambition and imagination. He was a practical man with broad capabilities; his genius I think was in the organization of automobile production. Like Mr. Nash, he recognized the opportunity offered by the young and promising automobile business. They both were true leaders of its early development and became heads of gr

I was of two minds about Mr. Durant. I admired his automotive genius, his imagination, his generous human qualities, and his integrity. His loyalty to the enterprise was absolute. I recognized, as Mr. Raskob and Pierre S. du Pont had, that he had created and inspired the dynamic growth of General Motors. But I thought he was too casual in his ways