Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors (review)

In writing a biography of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., David Farber has taken on a difficult, if not impossible, task. Though Sloan stands as one of the most important figures in modern business history, he was an extremely private person who exercised tight control over his public image. Only a small fraction of his business papers survive or are accessible to researchers, and primary documents from his private life are almost nonexistent. Forced by these circumstances to eschew traditional biography, Farber seeks to "explore Sloan's vision of the United States and his attempts to make it conform to his ideal of a productive society" (p. xi). The result is a book that provides tantalizing insights into Sloan's character and legacy but one that, as Farber himself acknowledges, is inevitably incomplete.

After dispensing quickly with Sloan's years before General Motors (GM), the book's early chapters focus primarily on his tenure at Hyatt Roller Bearing and his subsequent entry into and ascendancy at GM. This is well-known territory, covered by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and in Sloan's autobiographies. Farber does a good job in providing us with the atmosphere of the early automobile industry and at least some sense of the personalities involved. Sloan Rules here provides welcome nuance and flavor to the impressive but relatively bloodless accounts found in earlier work. Empirically and analytically, however, this portion of the book is overshadowed by its predecessors. Partly, this is a function of depth; Chandler and Stephen Salsbury's treatment of this period is probably lengthier than the whole of Sloan Rules. But, partly, the book's weakness here derives from an inability to break free from the analytical frame created by Chandler and Salsbury, who emphasize the rational, technical aspects of Sloan's management style.

Although this rational template is surely an essential aspect of Sloan's legacy, it is, as Farber often recognizes, not the whole story. Scattered throughout Sloan Rules are hints that Sloan's actions as a manager often departed dramatically from this template. (A word of caution: my criticisms here touch directly on themes developed in my own work.) Despite his reputation as one who relied extensively on factual analysis, Sloan often "said what was most useful" for his purposes and was "not a perfectly reliable source" of information (p.256). In managing his private foundation, he "surrounded himself with 'yes men'" rather than implementing a rationalized structure (p. 212). That Farber catalogues and attempts to explain such behavior is to his credit. The problem is that he never squares these observations with the image of the rational manager for whom "[i]nstinct, gut reaction, [and] feelings ... had no place in the corporate decision- making process" (p. 53). We are left with the image of a brilliant political manager of people grafted uncomfortably onto the more familiar account of Sloan as a dispassionate bureaucrat who made decisions based only on the facts. Resolving this disjuncture is crucial to understanding Sloan's management style, the organization that he created, and perhaps his personality.

It is puzzling to me that Farber, who clearly went to great lengths to search out all available information on Sloan, does not utilize much of the archival material that is available, though he is clearly aware of it. The Sloan papers found in the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., and Donaldson Brown archives of the Hagley Museum and Library provide substantial insight on this and other points. Such material might have also helped to fill in the GM side of Sloan's many activities after World War II, a period that Farber chooses not to cover.

Far more valuable is the account of Sloan's encounter with the New Deal. Here we glimpse a side of Sloan that has rarely been documented, as he...