Historical Quotes

"Finding the correct man (like Grant) to manage a particular task and then stepping back and letting him perform, when done correctly, was an act of precision. Sloan allowed himself to take a measure of pride in this aspect of his work."

D. Farber, "Sloan Rules"

"As long as the unwritten rule stands that the best way to achieve success at GM is to be a good finance man, the bad habit of juggling numbers in order to present the picture people want to see cannot be broken."

--"Rude Awakening" by Maryann Keller

"Operating decisions were more and more being made on The Fourteenth Floor. This because men rose in power who did not seem to have the capabilities or broad business outlook necessary to manage the business. They had gotten into power because they were part of a management system which for the most part put personal loyalties from one executive to another, and protection of the system above management skills; and put the use of corporate politics in the place of sound business leadership. They consequently lost sight of the corporation's management goals of keeping a keen eye on the marketplace and a firm hand on the corporate tiller.

I figured that an urgent program of comprehensive planning could be combined with a push for more sophisticated marketing to create a new corporate awareness on Fourteen.

We seem to forget that a cloistered executive, whose only social contacts are with similar executives who make $500,000 a year, and who has not really bought a car the way a customer has in years, has no basis to judge public taste.

Our inability to compete with the foreign manufacturers is more due to management failure than anything else. Past managements spent our lush advantage extravagantly...the system and management are stifling initiative. Leadership and innovation are impossible...Not only are these people of no help, most of what they do is wrong. After a short time, the isolated executives would find their markets taken away by competitors who were attuned to the wants and needs of the public and who were exercising their franchises to operate responsibly."

-- John DeLorean, 1979
"On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors"

"Executive vice president, F. Alan Smith, who followed Reuss, outlined a gloomy picture. From 1980 through 1985, he told the group, GM spent $45 billion in capital investment, yet increased its worldwide market share by only 1 percentage point, to 22 percent. Until mid-1986, the capital-spending plan called for an additional $35 billion through 1989, but that had been reduced.

"For the same amount of money," he told the GM managers, "we could buy Toyota and Nissan outright," instantly increasing the market share to 40 percent."

--"Rude Awakening" by Maryann Keller

"By the mid-1950s, the extensive dealer network set up so carefully by R. H .Grant two decades before was a shambles. Dealer complaints prodded Senator O'Mahoney to his "study of the antitrust laws," in the middle of which Harlow Curtice was forced to announce publicly that General Motors would extend the annual dealer contract to a five-year term. The public-relations gesture fell short, largely because the company insisted on retaining the power to cancel a dealer agreement unilaterally."

"Eight months after the O'Mahoney hearings closed, President Eisenhower, remembering all the campaign contributions Art Summerfield had wrung from auto dealers, repaid the debt. He signed into law the "Auto Dealers Day-in-Court Act," partially protecting the nation's 25,000 local auto dealers from capricious summary cancellations."

-- "Chrome Colossus"

"Throughout 2002, and particularly in December, GM had flooded the market with rebates and zero-interest financing, at a cost of nearly $4,000 for every car and truck that it sold."

--"The End of Detroit"

"On top of it all, GM offered breathtakingly generous terms to its rental car customers like Enterprise and Hertz, putting an estimated 70,000 more cars than usual into their lots, easily enough to guarantee that it would end the year with a market share gain--albeit, in the end, a miniscule one."

--"The End of Detroit"

"Estes did not stand alone; faith in the large car ran strong at General Motors. "The car purchase and buying up to bigger cars in the market are the fundamental concepts of American life," table-pounding Mack W. Worden, the corporation's marketing vice-president, trumpeted. An inadvertent echo of hucksters "Carload" Collins and Dick Grant, Worden urged everyone "to help sell America out of its troubles. The way to keep the economy from sliding further downhill," he told the American Marketing Association, "is for the salesmen and saleswomen of this country to get out and sell something, and for everyone to begin to reverse the gloom-and-doom psychology that seems to control the attitudes and adversely influences the action of too many people." One could almost hear Herbert Hoover cheering from the Elysian Fields."

-- "Chrome Colossus"

"Toyota also will have key advice from Kurt Ritter, the former general manager at Chevrolet, who oversaw its pickups and SUVs. Ritter left in spring 2003 to join Toyota's ad agency. The move angered GM, and Ritter subsequently opened his own consulting firm. His only client is Toyota."

-- "The End of Detroit"

"Few of the articles that gush over GM's rebirth under Smith mention that the company has been losing market share since 1962..."

--- "The Big Boys"

"Domestic automakers faced two choices as cars from Japan began to flood the U.S. market during the late 1970s: lower their prices in response to the competition or sacrifice market share to maximize short term profits."

--- "The Big Boys"

"In 1980, a fully foreseeable but even more dreaded statistic had floated across the Pacific. Japan for the first time surpassed the United States as the leading automobile-producing nation in the world. That same year GM reported its first annual loss ($763 million) since 1921."

--- "The Big Boys"