Drea Knufken
16. My Years with General Motors
by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.
1963
Sloan’s “as told to” opus still stands as the most cogent expression of the managerial philosophy that dominated American business for most of the 20th century. With insightful authority, this fabled CEO chronicles General Motors’ resurrection, under his leadership, from a nearly bankrupt enterprise in the early 1900s to the world’s greatest industrial corporation when he retired in 1956.
Particularly striking is this book’s unintentional expression of a value system: a relentless commitment to the engineering worldview of efficiency as paramount. Sloan’s simultaneous decentralization of manufacturing and centralization of corporate policy and financial controls became the basis for an organizational model that dominated American industry for more than half a century.
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