My Years with General Motors

Sloan ran General Motors from 1923 to 1946 as president and chief executive and until 1956 as chairman, and this book documents the management system he built. It was written with substantial staff assistance and delayed by GM's legal department for years over antitrust concerns.

The central structural contribution is decentralised operations with coordinated control. Sloan divided GM into divisions with operating autonomy and profit responsibility, while centralising financial control, capital allocation and policy at the corporate level through committees. He describes this as a permanent tension rather than a solved problem, and he is explicit that the balance requires continuous adjustment.

The product strategy was a car for every purse and purpose, a ladder of brands from Chevrolet through Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac, each at a defined price point, which allowed GM to compete against Ford's single-model strategy across the whole market and to move customers up the ladder as their incomes rose. Sloan also introduced the annual model change and instalment financing through GMAC, both of which changed the industry.

The financial control material covers return on investment as the governing measure, standard volume accounting that allowed division performance to be assessed independently of the business cycle, and the forecasting and inventory control systems developed after the 1920 and 1921 inventory disaster. The book is dry and written in an institutional voice. Sloan says nothing meaningful about labour relations, which were violent during his tenure, and nothing about the products themselves. Drucker's Concept of the Corporation covers the same organisation more analytically. It is a primary source on the invention of the multidivisional corporation.

Professor of business history at Harvard Business School; won a Pulitzer Prize for The Visible Hand and died in 2007.

Strategy and Structure established that firms adopt the multidivisional form once they diversify, and The Visible Hand showed how salaried managers displaced market coordination inside large American enterprises - the source texts for how conglomerates and holding companies are analysed. Scale and Scope extends the comparison to Britain and Germany and explains why different ownership patterns produced different corporate structures.

Harvard Business School, Johns Hopkins University