Alfred Sloan

Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr. was an American business executive in the automotive industry. He was a long-time president, chairman and CEO of General Motors Corporation. Sloan, first as a senior executive and later as the head of the organization, helped GM grow from the 1920s through the 1950s, decades when concepts such as the annual model change, brand architecture, industrial engineering, automotive design (styling), and planned obsolescence transformed the industry, and when the industry changed lifestyles and the built environment in America and throughout the world.

Sloan wrote his memoir, My Years with General Motors, in the 1950s. Like Henry Ford, the other "head man" of an automotive colossus, Sloan is remembered today with a complex mixture of admiration for his accomplishments, appreciation for his philanthropy, and unease or reproach regarding his attitudes during the interwar period and World War II.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Sloan studied electrical engineering initially at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, then transferred to and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1895. While attending MIT he joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity. In 1898, Sloan married Irene Jackson of Roxbury, Massachusetts. The couple had no children but Sloan was very close to his younger half-brother, Raymond.

Sloan became president and owner of Hyatt Roller Bearing, a company that made roller- and ball-bearings, in 1899 when his father and another investor bought out the company from the previous owner. Oldsmobile was Hyatt's first automotive customer, with many other companies soon following suit. In 1916 Hyatt merged with other companies into United Motors Company, which soon became part of General Motors Corporation. Sloan became vice-president of GM, then president (1923), and finally chairman of the board (1937). 

In 1934, he established the philanthropic, nonprofit Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. GM under Sloan became famous for managing diverse operations with financial statistics such as return on investment; these measures were introduced to GM by Donaldson Brown, a protege of GM vice-president John J. Raskob. Raskob came to GM as an advisor to Pierre S. du Pont and the du Pont corporation; the latter was a principal investor in GM whose executives largely ran GM in the 1920s.

Sloan is credited with establishing annual styling changes, from which came the concept of planned obsolescence. He also established a pricing structure in which (from lowest to highest priced) Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac, referred to as the ladder of success, did not compete with each other, and buyers could be kept in the GM "family" as their buying power and preferences changed as they aged. 

In 1919, he and his corporate deputies created the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, a financing arm that practically invented the auto loan credit system, that allowed car buyers to bypass having to save for years to buy Ford's affordable car. These concepts, along with Ford's resistance to the change in the 1920s, propelled GM to industry-sales leadership by the early 1930s, a position it retained for over 70 years. Under Sloan's direction, GM became the largest industrial enterprise the world had ever known.

In the 1930s GM, long hostile to unionization, confronted its workforce—newly organized and ready for labor rights—in an extended contest for control. Sloan was averse to violence of the sort associated with Henry Ford. He preferred spying, investing in an internal undercover apparatus to gather information and monitor labor union activity.[citation needed] When workers organized the massive Flint sit-down strike in 1936, Sloan found that espionage had little value in the face of such open tactics, and instead the successful strike legitimized the United Auto Workers as the exclusive bargaining representative for GM workers.

The world's first university-based executive education program, the Sloan Fellows, started in 1931 at MIT under the sponsorship of Sloan. A Sloan Foundation grant established the MIT School of Industrial Management in 1952 with the charge of educating 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 premier business schools. Additional grants established a Sloan Institute of Hospital Administration in 1955 at Cornell University-the first two-year graduate program of its type in the US, a Sloan Fellows Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1957, and at London Business School in 1965. 

They became degree programs in 1976, awarding the degree of Master of Science in Management. Sloan's name also lives on in the Sloan-Kettering Institute and Cancer Center in New York. In 1951, Sloan received the Hundred Year Association of New York's Gold Medal Award "in recognition of outstanding contributions to the City of New York".