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•Six Greatest Management Thinkers 113

It cannot be said that the year-long experiment did not work. Once the
situation was made more standard by lifting the level of profit centres, the first
line managers were much more conscious of selling profitably.

As became very obvious during the periods of trouble through which GM has

had to go, Sloan worried about the problems associated with the company’s size. ‘In

practically all our activities we seem to suffer from the inertia resulting from our

great size’ said Sloan in the 1930s. ‘There are so many people involved

and it requires such a tremendous effort to put something new into effect Sloan’s seg-

that a new idea is likely to be insignificant in comparison with the effort mentation of

that it takes to put it across … Sometimes I am almost forced to the con- the market

clusion that General Motors is so large and its inertia so great that it is changed the

impossible for us to be leaders.’ structure of the

But prior to that in 1925 they had overtaken Ford. The new organi- car industry

sation and commitment to annual changes to its models had successfully and provided a

put the good old Model T into second place. Sloan’s segmentation of the model for how

market changed the structure of the car industry and provided a model firms could do

for how firms could do the same in other industries. the same in

While remembered mainly for the product and organisational strat- other industries.

egy, Sloan, it is interesting to note, again took a very lively interest in what

we would now regard as progressive human resource management. Whilst he might

from time to time miss out on policy meetings, he always attended personnel meet-

ings and invested a lot of time in selecting the right people for the job.