Review of 'My Years with General Motors' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Too many words ;-) It's not conversational easy reading like contemporary business books. It's a pain to read it. However, it's a really good lesson in leadership. Sloan clearly didn't believe in pulling rank or letting himself get lobbied to make stupid business decisions by division leaders within GM. One of the central conflicts described in the book is the conflict over whether GM should bet big on copper-cooled engines (e.g. Chevrolet_Series_M_Copper-Cooled), which was (pardon the pun) the hot new technology of the day. It's been so long since I've read the book that I don't remember all of the details, but the short answer is that GM minimized the investment in copper-cooled engines due to GM's willingness to allow for decentralized experimentation.
Microsoft was clearly modeled after Sloan's GM, which I believe played a pretty substantial role in their first few decades of success. In many ways, I …
Too many words ;-) It's not conversational easy reading like contemporary business books. It's a pain to read it. However, it's a really good lesson in leadership. Sloan clearly didn't believe in pulling rank or letting himself get lobbied to make stupid business decisions by division leaders within GM. One of the central conflicts described in the book is the conflict over whether GM should bet big on copper-cooled engines (e.g. Chevrolet_Series_M_Copper-Cooled), which was (pardon the pun) the hot new technology of the day. It's been so long since I've read the book that I don't remember all of the details, but the short answer is that GM minimized the investment in copper-cooled engines due to GM's willingness to allow for decentralized experimentation.
Microsoft was clearly modeled after Sloan's GM, which I believe played a pretty substantial role in their first few decades of success. In many ways, I think Google is trying to be the modern GM to Apple's Ford.