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GM Passes Ford, 1918-1938

GM Passes Ford, 1918-1938 PDF Author: Arthur J. Kuhn
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Book Description
The dramatic story of how upstart General Motors got ahead of pioneer Ford--and has stayed ahead--is told here along with an explanation of GM's success. This book argues that GM won the race by designing a successful performance-control system, in harmony with cybernetic principles and systems theory, under the leadership of Alfred Sloan and his expert team. Henry Ford, the passionate individualist, meanwhile established a losing tradition described by the author as anti-team, anti-expert, and anti-system. GM's recent difficulties, according to Dr. Kuhn, are a result of its lapse from early policies. In 1921 Ford held the largest share of a market ever attained by a single manufacturer, 59%, while GM had slipped from about 20% to 15%. Starting in 1924, GM climbed to over 40% of the market, a share it has held ever since, while Ford fell to about 10%. GM has outperformed Ford even more sharply in return to shareholders. The author, however, does not gloss over GM's weaknesses, especially its "laggard performance" in consumer safety and its "tunnel vision" in product development. Although the concepts of "steermanship" and "inquiring systems" were not set forth theoretically until after 1938, GM's leaders applied these concepts organizationally during the boom-and-bust 1920s and 1930s. Most of the book describes the affinities and clashes of personality leading to GM's adoption and Ford's rejection of a performance-control system. The final chapters describe GM's generally superior performance but show why GM, in spite of that, has had difficulties in meeting recent challenges. Here is exciting history with a compelling message.

GM Passes Ford, 1918-1938

GM Passes Ford, 1918-1938 PDF Author: Arthur J. Kuhn
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Book Description
The dramatic story of how upstart General Motors got ahead of pioneer Ford--and has stayed ahead--is told here along with an explanation of GM's success. This book argues that GM won the race by designing a successful performance-control system, in harmony with cybernetic principles and systems theory, under the leadership of Alfred Sloan and his expert team. Henry Ford, the passionate individualist, meanwhile established a losing tradition described by the author as anti-team, anti-expert, and anti-system. GM's recent difficulties, according to Dr. Kuhn, are a result of its lapse from early policies. In 1921 Ford held the largest share of a market ever attained by a single manufacturer, 59%, while GM had slipped from about 20% to 15%. Starting in 1924, GM climbed to over 40% of the market, a share it has held ever since, while Ford fell to about 10%. GM has outperformed Ford even more sharply in return to shareholders. The author, however, does not gloss over GM's weaknesses, especially its "laggard performance" in consumer safety and its "tunnel vision" in product development. Although the concepts of "steermanship" and "inquiring systems" were not set forth theoretically until after 1938, GM's leaders applied these concepts organizationally during the boom-and-bust 1920s and 1930s. Most of the book describes the affinities and clashes of personality leading to GM's adoption and Ford's rejection of a performance-control system. The final chapters describe GM's generally superior performance but show why GM, in spite of that, has had difficulties in meeting recent challenges. Here is exciting history with a compelling message.

Billy, Alfred, and General Motors

Billy, Alfred, and General Motors PDF Author: William Pelfrey
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
ISBN: 0814429610
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
This book is the tale not just of the two extraordinary men of its title but also of the formative decades of twentieth-century America, through two world wars and changes in business, industry, politics, and culture. You couldn’t find two more different men. Billy Durant was the consummate salesman, a brilliant wheeler-dealer with grand plans, unflappable energy, and a fondness for the high life. Alfred Sloan was the intellectual, an expert in business strategy and management, master of all things organizational. Together, this odd couple built perhaps the most successful enterprise in U.S. history, General Motors, and with it an industry that has come to define modern life throughout the world. In Billy, Alfred, and General Motors, business leaders and history buffs alike will discover: timeless lessons, cautionary tales, and motivational inspiration. The book includes vivid, warts-and-all portraits of the legends of the golden age of the automobile, from Henry Ford, Ransom Olds, and Charles Nash to the brilliant but uncredited David Dunbar Buick and Cadillac founder Henry Leland. The impact of Durant and Sloan on their contemporaries and their industry is matched only by the powerful legacy of their improbable and incredible partnership. Characters, events, and context -- all are brought skillfully and passionately to life in this meticulously researched and supremely readable book.

American Business Since 1920

American Business Since 1920 PDF Author: Thomas K. McCraw
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119097266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Book Description
Tells the story of how America’s biggest companies began, operated, and prospered post-World War I This book takes the vantage point of people working within companies as they responded to constant change created by consumers and technology. It focuses on the entrepreneur, the firm, and the industry, by showing—from the inside—how businesses operated after 1920, while offering a good deal of Modern American social and cultural history. The case studies and contextual chapters provide an in-depth understanding of the evolution of American management over nearly 100 years. American Business Since 1920: How It Worked presents historical struggles with decision making and the trend towards relative decentralization through stories of extraordinarily capable entrepreneurs and the organizations they led. It covers: Henry Ford and his competitor Alfred Sloan at General Motors during the 1920s; Neil McElroy at Procter & Gamble in the 1930s; Ferdinand Eberstadt at the government’s Controlled Materials Plan during World War II; David Sarnoff at RCA in the 1950s and 1960s; and Ray Kroc and his McDonald’s franchises in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first; and more. It also delves into such modern success stories as Amazon.com, eBay, and Google. Provides deep analysis of some of the most successful companies of the 20th century Contains topical chapters covering titans of the 2000s Part of Wiley-Blackwell’s highly praised American History Series American Business Since 1920: How It Worked is designed for use in both basic and advanced courses in American history, at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Levers of Control

Levers of Control PDF Author: Robert Simons
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 142216067X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Based on a ten-year examination of control systems in over 50 U.S. businesses, this book broadens the definition of control and establishes a critical bridge between the disciplines of strategy and accounting and control. In addition to the more traditional diagnostic control systems, Simons identifies three new control systems that allow strategic change: belief systems that communicate core values and provide inspiration and direction, boundary systems that frame the strategic domain and define the limits of freedom, and interactive systems that provide flexibility in adapting to competitive environments and encourage organizational learning. These four control systems, according to Simons, will provide managers with the basic levers for pursuing strategic objectives.

Making and Selling Cars

Making and Selling Cars PDF Author: James M. Rubenstein
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801873711
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Book Description
From the creation of fast food, to the design of cities, to the character of our landscape, the automobile has shaped nearly every aspect of modern American life. In fact, the U.S. motor vehicle industry is the largest manufacturing industry in the world. James Rubenstein documents the story of the automotive industry . . . which despite its power, is an industry constantly struggling to redefine itself and assure its success. Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry shows how this industry made adjustments and fostered innovations in both production and marketing in order to remain a viable force throughout the twentieth-century. Rubenstein builds his study of the American auto industry with care, taking the reader through this quintessentially modern history of production and consumption. Avoiding jargon while never over simplifying, Rubenstein gives a detailed and straightforward account of both the production and merchandising of cars. We learn how the industry began and about its methods for building cars and the modern American marketplace. Along the way there were many missteps and challenges—the Edsel, the fuel crisis, and the ascendancy of Japanese cars in the 1980s. The industry met these types of problems with new techniques and approaches. To demonstrate this, Rubenstein gives the reader examples of how the auto industry used to work, which he alternates with chapters showing how the industry has reinvented itself. Making and Selling Cars explains why the U.S. automotive industry has been and remains a vigorous shaper of the American economy.

Alfred P. Sloan

Alfred P. Sloan PDF Author: John Cunningham Wood
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415248297
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
This two-volume collection looks at the life and work of Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. (1875-1966), chief executive of General Motors from 1923 to 1946, whose unique and ahead-of-its-time management style left an indelible mark on business and management studies.Also featuring an extensive bibliography, this set will prove valuable to business students and researchers alike.

Coping with Variety

Coping with Variety PDF Author: Yannick Lung
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429839936
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Book Description
First published in 1999, this book explores pint points, compares and dates the development of product differentiation and variety. This book also analyses’ how firms have embraced a variety of ways of efficiently managing this verity though production, the design of the product as well as in the relations with the suppliers and distributors.

Quality in the Era of Industry 4.0

Quality in the Era of Industry 4.0 PDF Author: Kai Yang
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119932440
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Enables readers to use real-world data from connected devices to improve product performance, detect design vulnerabilities, and design better solutions Quality in the Era of Industry 4.0 provides an insightful guide in harnessing user performance and behavior data through AI and other Industry 4.0 technologies. This transformative approach enables companies not only to optimize products and services in real-time, but also to anticipate and mitigate likely failures proactively. In a succinct and lucid style, the book presents a pioneering framework for a new paradigm of quality management in the Industry 4.0 landscape. It introduces groundbreaking techniques such as utilizing real-world data to tailor products for superior fit and performance, leveraging connectivity to adapt products to evolving needs and use-cases, and employing cutting-edge manufacturing methods to create bespoke, cost-effective solutions with greater efficiency. Case examples featuring applications from the automotive, mobile device, home appliance, and healthcare industries are used to illustrate how these new quality approaches can be used to benchmark the product’s performance and durability, maintain smart manufacturing, and detect design vulnerabilities. Written by a seasoned expert with experience teaching quality management in both corporate and academic settings, Quality in the Era of Industry 4.0 covers sample topics such as: Evolution of quality through industrial revolutions, from ancient times to the first and second industrial revolutions Quality by customer value creation, explaining differences in producers, stakeholders, and customers in the new digital age, along with new realities brought by Industry 4.0 Data quality dimensions and strategy, data governance, and new talents and skill sets for quality professionals in Industry 4.0 Automated product lifecycle management, predictive quality control, and defect prevention using technologies like smart factories, IoT, and sensors Quality in the Era of Industry 4.0 is a highly valuable resource for product engineers, quality managers, quality engineers and quality consultants, industrial engineers, and systems engineers who wish to make a participatory approach towards data-driven design, economical mass-customization, and late differentiation.

Thrift and Thriving in America

Thrift and Thriving in America PDF Author: Joshua Yates
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199339767
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 2465

Book Description
Thrift is a powerful and evolving moral ideal, disposition, and practice that has indelibly marked the character of American life since its earliest days. Its surprisingly multifaceted character opens a number of expansive vistas for analysis, not only in the American past, but also in its present. Thrift remains, if perhaps in unexpected and counter-intuitive ways, intensely relevant to the complex issues of contemporary moral and economic life. Thrift and Thriving in America is a collection of groundbreaking essays from leading scholars on the seminal importance of thrift to American culture and history. From a rich diversity of disciplinary perspectives, the volume shows that far from the narrow and attenuated rendering of thrift as a synonym of saving and scrimping, thrift possess an astonishing capaciousness and dynamism, and that the idiom of thrift has, in one form or another, served as the primary language for articulating the normative dimensions of economic life throughout much of American history. The essays put thrift in a more expansive light, revealing its compelling etymology-its sense of "thriving." This deeper meaning has always operated as the subtext of thrift and at times has even been invoked to critique its more restricted notions. So understood, thrift moves beyond the instrumentalities of "more or less" and begs the question: what does it mean and take to thrive? Thoroughly examining how Americans have answered this question, Thrift and Thriving in America provides fascinating insight into evolving meanings of material wellbeing, and of the good life and the good society more generally, and will serve as a perennial resource on a notion that has and will continue to shape and define American life.

It Came Out Fighting!

It Came Out Fighting! PDF Author: Jeffrey D. Shively
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1434348342
Category : Cadillac automobile
Languages : en
Pages : 142

Book Description
An analysis of the factors that contributed to Cadillac Motor Car Division's ascension to sales leadership in the fine car field in the years following World War II.