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Billy, Alfred, and General Motors
book

Billy, Alfred, and General Motors

by William Pelfrey
March 2006
Intermediate to advanced
336 pages
8h 52m
English
AMACOM
Content preview from Billy, Alfred, and General Motors

CHAPTER SEVEN

Birth of a General

Unlike Billy Durant and Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan preferred to be in the background rather than under the spotlight, even as his reputation as a shrewd executive continued to grow. He felt that the automobile business was attracting “as sugar draws flies, a host of persons who had strong appetites for excitement.”1

Sloan saw himself as a different breed, dealing with those persons with “strong appetites for excitement” only when there was a need for what he saw as his own unique technical expertise. Yet he actually admitted to enjoying a meeting of the minds when the topic was an engineering problem.

“Mix with them?” he mused. “I felt I had more important work to do at the Hyatt plant. But the mixing was important ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780814433874