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Technology and Culture 45.1 (2004) 192-194



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Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors. By David Farber. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. xii+292. $27.50.

As much as anyone, Alfred P. Sloan is responsible for creating the high-consumption lifestyle that dominates modern American life. During his forty years at General Motors (1916-56), Sloan took the lead in converting the firm from a loose assortment of tentatively related companies into the largest, most productive, and most profitable industrial enterprise in the world. Sloan and his team made GM the model for how to efficiently organize and manage the mass production of almost any complex product.

Throughout it all, Sloan viewed himself as a consummate rationalist, [End Page 192] guided always by "an engineering respect for the facts" and focused only on the financial well-being of his firm. While true, this assessment is also incomplete. In Sloan Rules, David Farber looks more deeply into Sloan than any previous author and finds a man whose rationality was predicated on a loose but powerful vision of the proper role of the corporation in society and of the manager within the corporation. I recommend this study to anyone interested in modern management or business-government relations.

Farber opens with a brief description of Sloan's early years. We glimpse his comfortable boyhood in Brooklyn, where he picked up the accent he would carry for the rest of his life, and his schooling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he finished the rigorous four-year engineering program in three grueling years. Sloan was a very focused young man, eager to get on with life, which for him meant work. After graduation he experienced a few false starts, but in 1897 he bought the controlling interest in the Hyatt Roller Bearing Company. He was on his way.

For those already knowledgeable about Sloan, the early chapters of Sloan Rules are a comfortable mix of old and new information. The basic outlines of Sloan's life are familiar, but Farber has an eye for the telling detail, which gives his story a vitality that is lacking in previous treatments. Given Sloan's natural reticence and the lack of any personal papers, this is an impressive feat. The book moves next into Sloan's years as owner of Hyatt; his decision to sell to Billy Durant, the flamboyant and erratic head of General Motors; and Sloan's four decades in which he became the guiding influence on GM.

Although Farber's description is congruent with the picture presented in Sloan's autobiography, My Years at General Motors (1964), and other sources, the perspective is different. Above all else, Sloan prided himself on his abilities as a rational manager, and he assumed that rationality was more or less independent of his view of the good society. What constitutes a good society is very much in the eye of the beholder, however, and Farber convincingly shows how Sloan's social vision not only shaped his actions at General Motors but also mirrored the dominant view in modern America. For Sloan, the best society was the most productive, and this made the large corporation the most important institution in American life—and the executives who ran these corporations the most important members of society.

For society to function at its best, or most efficient, it was therefore important that executives be responsible, rational stewards of national prosperity. It was equally important for these impartial technocrats to be unhindered by the demands of government or labor. The consuming public had responsibility for deciding what got produced, but not without—in Sloan's view—a good deal of coaching from business. Ultimately, Farber seems most interested in describing the role of the corporation in the high-consumption economy and society of the modern United States. He reminds [End Page 193] us that the large-scale corporation as currently organized is an incredibly efficient and effective machine for generating wealth and raising living standards, but, with the exception of...

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