About this ebook
Such skepticism would be mistaken.
Adventures is... an epic saga, a rags-to-riches story of a group of plucky eccentrics who, on fire for opportunity, began by building horseless carriages in backyards and toolsheds and ended up — to their own surprise as much as anyone’s — creating a manufacturing juggernaut that dominated the global economy for half a century. Sloan stumbled into the automobile industry when it was still possible to know everybody, and into his recollections walk a cast of characters the modern consumer knows only as brands but who Sloan reminds us were first of all men: Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, Dave Buick, the Dodge Brothers, Eli Olds. It’s a fun ride, an insider’s peek into the chaotic, rickety, wholly improbable beginnings of a new industry before anyone knew what the automobile would become or what it would mean for the world...
In corporate boardrooms across the country, business executives and investors speak reverently to one another of something called the shareholder theory of value...
Alfred Sloan thought differently. The view he articulates in... his story of the automobile industry, is that a business is only incidentally an investment and that only a banker could view it in such terms. In Sloan’s telling, a business is something quite different. A business is a cooperative social enterprise that is there to solve problems...
A second, equally refreshing, piece of Sloan’s theory of the corporation involves its implications about what corporate management should be. Because the corporation exists to solve problems and because problems are solved by human ingenuity, it follows that the well-functioning corporation should be structured to maximize invention, initiative, and imagination.” — Introduction to the 2025 eBook edition by Adam F. Falk, President, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
“For Alfred P. Sloan, top man in General Motors, to call himself a white-collar man, just like that, may savor a bit of understatement. It gives somewhat the sound of an American success story in the Horatio Alger style, which this book is not intended to be. Yet, as you read the hard facts of the growth of the automotive industry to giant proportions with incredible speed, it comes home to you that it is Horatio Alger, after all.” — Henry James Forman, The New York Times
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About the author
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr. (1875-1966) excelled as a student in the public schools and at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute where he studied electrical engineering before transferring to and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1895. He started working as a draftsman in a small machine shop, the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company of Newark, New Jersey, which made roller- and ball-bearings. In 1899 at age 24 he became president and owner of Hyatt after his father, a coffee and tea importer trained as a machinist, and another investor bought the company from the previous owner.
In 1916 Hyatt merged with other companies into United Motors Company, which soon became part of General Motors Corporation (GM). Sloan became vice-president of GM, operating vice-president when Pierre S. Du Pont and John J. Raskob wrested control of GM from William C. Durant in 1920, and succeeded Pierre S. du Pont as president in 1923. Sloan became chairman of the board in 1937, continued as CEO until 1946 and retired from the chairmanship in 1956.
At GM, Sloan established annual styling changes and a differentiated pricing structure for Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac so they would not compete with each other. In 1919, he created GMAC, a financing arm that helped propel GM to market leadership by the early 1930s, a position GM retained for over 70 years. Under Sloan, GM became the largest industrial enterprise in the world.
In 1934, Sloan established the philanthropic Alfred P. Sloan Foundation which started the world’s first university-based executive education program, the Sloan Fellows, in 1931 at MIT. MIT opened a School of Industrial Management in 1952 to educate the “ideal manager”, the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management. In the 1940s, Sloan and Charles F. Kettering, established the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York City, now a leading biomedical research institution which became part of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 1960.
