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Alfred P. Sloan And The Triumph Of General Motors
University Of Chicago Press
February 2005
On Sale: February 15, 2005
Featuring: Alfred P. Sloan
299 pages ISBN: 0226238059 EAN: 9780226238050 Paperback
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Non-Fiction Biography
Alfred P. Sloan Jr. became the president of General Motors
in 1923 and stepped down as its CEO in 1946. During this
time, he led GM past the Ford Motor Company and on to
international business triumph by virtue of his brilliant
managerial practices and his insights into the new consumer
economy he and GM helped to produce. Bill Gates has said
that Sloan's 1964 management tome, My Years with General
Motors, "is probably the best book to read if you want to
read only one book about business." And if you want to read only one book about Sloan, that book
should be historian David Farber's Sloan Rules. Here, for the first time, is a study of both the difficult
man and the pathbreaking executive. Sloan Rules reveals the
GM genius as not only a driven manager of men, machines,
money, and markets but also a passionate and not always wise
participant in the great events of his day. Sloan, for
example, reviled Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal; he
firmly believed that politicians, government bureaucrats,
and union leaders knew next to nothing about the workings of
the new consumer economy, and he did his best to stop them
from intervening in the private enterprise system. He was
instrumental in transforming GM from the country's largest
producer of cars into the mainstay of America's "Arsenal
of Democracy" during World War II; after the war, he bet
GM's future on renewed American prosperity and helped lead
the country into a period of economic abundance. Through his
business genius, his sometimes myopic social vision, and his
vast fortune, Sloan was an architect of the
corporate-dominated global society we live in today. David Farber's story of America's first corporate genius
is biography of the highest order, a portrait of an
extraordinarily compelling and skillful man who shaped his
era and ours.
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