My Years with General Motors

General Motors was one of the most influential companies of the 20th century, and it scaled to its zenith in the mid 20th-century under the hand of Alfred Sloan. The book is Sloan’s memoir and an overview of almost all aspects of the company, from its early roots and foundations to the grand restructuring of the company’s management. I paid particular attention to the management aspect of GM, because it had to transform from a completely broken/nonexistent management system around the 1920s to being an exemplar of stellar American corporate management during the company’s maturity. Along with the good come some things that made the book hard to read:it is long and Sloan often goes into copious amounts of detail on rather obscure and sometimes technical topics, and many of the parts were written in a dry, formal tone.

The key of GM’s management philosophy is having decentralized divisions for operations which follow policy made by a centralized executive team. In doing this, the organizational structure separated policy-making from everyday operations. Having this allows operating divisions to have more initiative to innovate their own solutions instead of taking direct top-down orders, and leaves the operations experts to call shots instead of being micromanaged. Lastly, GM had an interconnected web of subcommittees that facilitated communications across divisions and across the division/executive gap and acted as a loose glue that kept the organization together. Today, I see companies like Stripe do this well, with many decentralized teams and horizontalized product offerings that are led by divisional heads (presumably) who follow a general policy set by the executive team. Google does this as well, albeit with much more quantity (many smaller projects which, after proving themselves with usage, get more resources invested).