GM: Sloan’s My Years With General Motors

Sloan’s classic management-text memoir and more recent sources reveal his use of all six rational methods during his 1920s enhancement of General Motors. The key methods were, first, his emphasis on innovative adaptation, which restructured General Motors into multiple operating divisions; second, his emphasis on strategically calculated marketing, which pioneered annual model changes, automobile styling, and style-based advertising; third, his emphasizing of institutionalized deliberation through a multi-tiered committee system to enhance policy-making. CEO Sloan’s use of these rational methods resulted in General Motors becoming the world’s largest industrial corporation, with more than half a million employees, and having its methods copied by competitors. Finally, there is a description of the rivalry between his and Henry Ford’s corporations and approaches, resulting in Sloanism’s administrative rationality defeating Fordism’s focus on efficient production.