Alfred P. Sloan

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Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr. (May 23, 1875-February 17, 1966) was an American business executive in the car industry.

He served as both president, chairman, and CEO of GM.

Sloan, first as a senior executive and later as the company's CEO, helped the company grow from the 1920s to the 1950s, when innovations such as annual model overhaul, brand architecture, industrial engineering, automobile planning (styling), and planned obsolescence revolutionized the industry, as the market changed lifestyles and the built environment in America and around the world. Sloan wrote his book, "My Years with GM" in the 1950s, including Henry Ford, the other "head man" of an automobile colossus, and unease or reproach of his behavior during the interwar period and World War II.

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Life and career

Sloan, a native of New Haven, Connecticut, studied electrical engineering at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1895. He was a member of Delta Upsilon Fraternity while attending MIT. In 1898, Sloan married Irene Jackson of Roxbury, Massachusetts. While the couple had no children, Sloan was very close to his younger brother, Raymond.

In 1899, Sloan became president and owner of Hyatt Roller Bearing, a roller-and-ball bearing business, after his father and another investor bought the company from the previous owner. Oldsmobile was Hyatt's first automobile client, and a number of other companies followed suit shortly. In 1916, Hyatt became part of GM, which later became part of GM. Sloan became vice president (1923), then president (1923), and then chairman of the board (1937). Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic, non-profit foundation, was established in 1934. GM has been known for implementing various aspects of financial reporting, including return on investment; these steps were introduced to GM by Donaldson Brown, a protege of GM vice president John J. Raskob. Raskob joined GM as an advisor to Pierre S. du Pont and the du Pont corporation; the latter was a significant investor in the GM, who had largely controlled the company in the 1920s.

Sloan is credited with introducing annual styling changes, the first of which was the concept of planned obsolescence. He also established a pricing structure in which (from lowest to highest) Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac did not compete with each other, and buyers could stay in the GM "family" as their purchasing power and taste evolved as they aged. He and his corporate deputies established the GM Acceptance Corporation, a financing arm that virtually invented the car loan credit system, in 1919, allowing car owners to avoid having to wait for years to buy Ford's affordable car. These ideas, as well as Ford's retaliation against the 1920s, had propelled GM to industry-sales leadership by the early 1930s, a position it occupied for more than 70 years. GM became the world's largest industrial company under Sloan's leadership.

GM, long opposed to unionization, confronted its workforce in the 1930s—newly organized and ready for labor rights—in a stalemate for power. Sloan was averse to violence of the sort associated with Henry Ford. He likes spying, investing in an internal undercover camera to gather data and monitor labour union activities. Sloan found that espionage had little value in the face of such open tactics, and that the United Auto Workers had been legitimized as the sole bargaining representative for GM employees when workers initiated the massive Flint sit-down strike in 1936.

The Sloan Fellows, the world's first university-based executive education program, began at MIT in 1931, under Sloan's sponsorship. The MIT School of Industrial Management was established in 1952 with the aim of teaching the "ideal manager," and the school was renamed in Sloan's honor as the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, one of the world's top business schools. In 1955, three Sloan Institute of Hospital Administration, the first two-year graduate program of its kind in the United States, was established at Cornell University, a Sloan Fellows Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business, 1957, and then in 1965 at London Business School. In 1976, they began degree programs, with the degree of Master of Science in Management. Sloan's name has also appeared in New York's Sloan-Kettering Institute and Cancer Center. Sloan received the Hundred Year Association of New York "in recognition of his contributions to the City of New York" in 1951.

The Alfred P. Sloan Museum, which exhibits the evolution of the automobile industry and traveling exhibits, is located in Flint, Michigan.

Sloan maintained an office in 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Rockefeller Center, now known as the GE Building. On April 2, 1956, he resigned as the chairman of GM. My Years with GM was more or less complete at this time, but GM's legal team, who feared that it would be used to fund an antitrust lawsuit against GM, stayed tight on its site for nearly a decade. In 1964, it was finally published. Sloan died in 1966.

In 1975, Sloan was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame.

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