Word: sloan
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Only occasionally is Sloan baffled: "What the end is to be I do not know, but I do know that notwithstanding all the wonders we are accomplishing in technological progress, we just can't keep up with the politicians' ability to spend our money...
...something that must be read mostly between the lines: the story of what Grade A business management means and can achieve. It is the inadvertent self-revelation of a resourceful organizing genius who is a really great manager, but not in Mr. Burnham's sense. The greatness of Sloan's achievement is that he took the vast rambling collection of companies which Promoter Durant put together with all a promoter's nonchalance, and made it into a well-knit, well-run company...
...that, so far, government managers have yet to prove-in Russia, Germany or the U.S.-that they can permanently run the economic machine with sufficiently satisfactory results to keep mankind in bondage to them, run it with an efficiency anywhere near equal to that with which Mr. Sloan runs General Motors...
...importance of the comparison is that Manager Sloan is a democrat. He is a democrat not only because he is a human, just and generous man, but because he could not operate in any other way. He did not learn democracy in books. His democracy is implicit in his life. It is realistic, practical, unsentimental. His success with General Motors was that he literally made his management a democracy of brains, for he knows that democracy is the vital fluid of great corporate organizations, holding their personnel from top to bottom in a creative balance to each other. When...
This mood does not make Manager Sloan call for a managerial revolution. He thinks he knows a better way. "A dynamic economy is essential to progress and the continuation of free enterprise. ... A static economy means decay and ultimate regimentation. . . . Some see danger in bigness. They fear the concentration of economic power. . . . That is in a degree true. It simply means, however, that industrial management must expand its horizon of responsibility. ... It must consider the impact of its operations on the economy as a whole in relation to the social and economic welfare of the entire community. . . . Those charged with...