Alfred P. Sloan
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Categories: NPOV disputes | 1875 births | 1966 deaths | Businesspeople | General Motors executives | Automotive related biographies | Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni | People from Connecticut
Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. (May 23, 1875 – February 17, 1966), long-time president and chairman of General Motors, was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He studied electrical engineering and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1892.
He became president of a machine shop making ball bearings in 1899. In 1916 his company merged with United Motors Corporation which eventually became part of General Motors Corporation. He became Vice-President, then President (1923), and finally Chairman of the Board (1937) of GM. 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 who was in turn the protege of Pierre du Pont — the DuPont corporation owned 43% of GM.
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 did not compete with each other, and a buyer could be kept in the GM "family" as their buying power and preferences changed as they aged. These concepts, along with Ford's resistance to the change in the 1920's, propelled GM to industry sales leadership by the early 1930's, a position it retains to this day. Under Sloan's direction, GM became the largest and most successful and profitable industrial enterprise the world had ever known.
During Alfred P. Sloan's leadership of GM, many public transport systems of trams in the US were replaced by buses. Many of the trams themselves were literally burnt in order to prevent any reversal in public transport policies. Some believe that GM orchestrated this bustitution; see General Motors streetcar conspiracy for details. Frequencies of bus services were decreased on less profitable routes, helping to encourage people to buy their own automobiles and travel independently.
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 the subtle use of spying and had built up the best undercover apparatus the business community had ever seen up to that time. When the workers organized a massive sitdown strike in 1936, Sloan found that espionage had little value in the face of such open tactics.
The world's first university-based executive education program — the Sloan Fellows — was created 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. A second grant established a Sloan Fellows Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1957. The program became the Stanford Sloan Master's Program in 1976, awarding the degree of Master of Science in Management.
Sloan retired as chairman on April 2, 1956 and died in 1966.
| Preceded by: Lammot du Pont | Chairman General Motors 1937 – 1956 | Succeeded by: Albert Bradley |
| Preceded by: (none) | CEO General Motors 1923 – 1946 | Succeeded by: Charles Erwin Wilson |
| Preceded by: Pierre S. du Pont | President General Motors 1923 – 1937 | Succeeded by: William S. Knudsen |
See also
- The Alfred P. Sloan Prize. Given to films dealing with science and technology by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation each year at the Sundance Film Festival
External links
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, whose total assets had a market value of over $1.5 billion in 2005
- review of Klein and Olson's film Taken for a Ride
- contribution of Alfred P. Sloan to changes in rapid transit systems
- extract from Bradford C. Snell, American Ground Transport: A Proposal for Restructuring the Automobile, Truck, Bus and Rail Industries. Report presented to the Committee of the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, United States Senate, February 26, 1974, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1974, pp. 16-24.
