Sublime

The Bonus Plan also provides much more flexibility on the up side than is possible under a salary system. It may be difficult to reward a man for superior performance by raising his salary, since the increase may upset the whole salary stratification. A salary increase, moreover, commits the company indefinitely, whereas the bonus makes it possible

We left him with best wishes. I realized more than ever that Henry Ford was better off without him. The Wills-St. Clair was a beautiful piece of engineering but utterly unsuitable for the times, and a prime reason for its failure was that few garage mechanics of those days knew how to service it.

In the wake of the 1956 agreement, AT&T appeared to be indestructible. It now had the U.S. government’s blessing. It was easily the largest company in the world by assets and by workforce. And its Bell Laboratories, as Fortune magazine had declared, was indisputably “the world’s greatest industrial laboratory.” And yet even in the 1960s and 197

The 1922 revisions also related the employee’s level of responsibility to his eligibility for bonuses. Since the simplest measure of an employee’s level of responsibility is his salary, eligibility for the bonus was set on that basis: for several years, beginning with 1922, the minimum salary for bonus eligibility was $5000 per year.

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

The first venture capital fund was founded in the United States in 1946, when Georges Doriot, the Dean of Harvard Business School and future founder of INSEAD (the leading international business school) created American Research and Development Corporation with Ralph Flanders and Karl Compton (a former president of MIT), to encourage private sector

Henry Ford was opinionated in matters about which he knew little or nothing. He could be small-minded, suspicious, jealous, and occasionally malicious and lacking in sincerity. He probably hastened the death of his only son.

Several kinds of economies are made possible by centralized staff operations. Among the most important are the economies that derive from the coordination of the divisions. These arise through the sharing of ideas and developments among general officers and divisional personnel. The divisions contribute ideas and techniques both to each other and t

It is not, therefore, a matter of the amount of profit but of the relation of that profit to the real worth of invested capital within the business.