My Years With General Motors

This edition has no photos nor charts. A free GM_Charts_Supplement.pdf can be download from enetpress.com

“Deliberately to stop growing is to suffocate. . . . I put no ceiling on progress.”
~Alfred P Sloan, Jr.

Alfred P Sloan, Jr. began his career with General Motors little realizing that the automobile presented one of the greatest industrial opportunities of modern times. It was because of his genius and leadership that General Motors Corporation grew to be one of the largest corporations on Earth. My Years with General Motors tells Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.’s remarkable story.

When Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. joined General Motors in 1918, it was a sprawling, loosely organized company heading toward severe financial and management crises. Two years later, after the resignation of president and founder W. C. Durant, Mr. Sloan and Pierre S. and Irénée du Pont assumed management responsibility and began to develop the delicate balance between centralized policy control and decentralized operational responsibility that made General Motors competitive in policy as well as in product.

Mr. Sloan describes the evolution of the company's basic management policies and strategic concepts: the organization policy, the concept of financial control, and the product policy which revolutionized the automobile market. This is the authentic inside story of how modern management techniques enabled General Motors to excel in the manufacture of not only cars and trucks, but diesel electric locomotives, household appliances, aviation engines, earth-moving equipment, and a variety of other durable goods. Because of Sloan's leadership, General Motors triumphed in the roaring 1920s, emerged strong from the depression of the 1930s, converted swiftly to war production in the 1940s, and broke all records for production, sales, and profits in the 1950s and '60s.

My Years With General Motors was an instant best seller when it was first published in 1964 and is still considered indispensable reading by acclaimed business leaders today. Bill Gates praises My Years With General Motors as the best book to read on business, and Business Week named it the number one choice for its "bookshelf of indispensable reading". Although the state of the art in management science has grown greatly in the half century since, My Years With General Motors is still the definitive historical resource on the practice of business management.