The Corporation and the Twentieth Century

the frame in half lengthwise and then in half again the other way. He then had them separate the four quarters by a few inches. Put your regular hood and radiator on it, Durant told them. There’s your new Oldsmobile for the coming year (Gustin 2012, pp. 112–13; Sloan 1941a, p. 84; Szudarek 1996).

69. Rae (1984, p. 45); Seltzer (1928, p. 158–60). 70. Pound (1934, p. 127).

71. Rae (1958, p. 260).

72. Curcio (2000, pp. 219–24).

73. General Motors Annual Report 1913, p. 10.

74. Chandler (1962, p. 122).

75. General Motors Annual Report (1913, p. 9; 1915, p. 8); Hounshell (1984, p. 224). Some

43,946 of the cars GM sold were Buicks (Curcio 2000, p. 224). 76. Gustin (2012, chapter 8); Rae (1958, pp. 261–63).

77. Seltzer (1928, p. 175).

78. Seltzer (1928, pp. 178–86).

79. Although GM announced that the Chevrolet Motor Company (Delaware) had been dissolved, in fact the holding company continued to exist as a vehicle (as it were) for holding GM stock (Seltzer 1928, p. 197). There is evidence that Durant tunneled resources among GM, Chevrolet, and United Motors, and it was only at the insistence of John Jakob Raskob and Du Pont (on which see below) that he agreed to merge the three into a single operating com- pany (Chandler and Salsbury 1971, p. 461; Farber 2013, p. 132).

80. Pelfrey (2006, pp. 211–13).

81. Louis P. Cain, “Motor Vehicle Registrations, By Vehicle Type: 1900–1995,” Table Df339- 342 in Carter et al. (2006), https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Df184-577 (ac- cessed August 17, 2022).

82. Klepper (2016, p. 18).

83. Abernathy and Utterback (1978).

84. Klepper and Simons (1997).

85. Pound (1934, p. 183); Seltzer (1928, p. 191).

86. Gustin (2012, p. 199).

87. Chrysler (1950, p. 161; 2000, pp. 250–55).

88. Chandler and Salsbury (1971); Farber (2013).

89. Farber (2013, pp. 133–43).

90. Chandler and Salsbury (1971, p. 451).

91. Chandler and Salsbury (1971, p. 475–91).

92. Livesay (1979, p. 232).

93. Over the period 1912 to 1920, GM retained $128 million in earnings out of total net earn-

ings before taxes of $285 million (GM Annual Report 1920, p. 9).

94. Seltzer (1928, pp. 200 and 204).

95. A central component of which was the Chevrolet holding company, which still owned

substantial amounts of GM stock (Chandler and Salsbury 1971, p. 489).

96. GM’s 1922 Annual Report explicitly blames Durant for the tractor fiasco and excoriates

the division managers for ignoring the Finance Committee’s orders to cut back investment. 97. In addition to Sloan’s two autobiographies (Sloan 1941a, 1964), see Farber (2002).

590 Notes to Chapter 5

98. Sloan (1964, pp. 47–48).

99. Sloan (1964, p. 31).

100. Sloan (1964, p. 53).

101. Chandler (1962, chapter 2).

102. The functions of purchasing and engineering reported to the general manager not the

president (Chandler 1962, p. 62).

103. Sloan (1941a, pp. 115–16).

104. Sloan (1941a, p. 107).

105. Rationality properly understood means that agents do the best they can with what they

know. It is not the ability to make rational decisions in this sense that is bounded. It is knowl- edge and cognitive processing capacity that are bounded (Langlois 1990).

106. Hayek (1945).

107. Coase (1937).

108. Hayek (1945); Jensen and Meckling (1992).

109. Drucker (1946, p. 46, emphasis original).

110. Drucker (1954, p. 205).

111. Chandler (1956). For Chandler’s own account of the genesis of Strategy and Structure

and his collaboration with Sloan, see Chandler (2009, pp. 239–42).

112. Sloan (1964).

113. My Years with General Motors was actually written before Strategy and Structure (Chandler

1962) even though it was published two years later. The reason is that Sloan initially decided not to publish the book on advice from General Motors attorneys, who feared that information from the GM archives could be used against the company in the protracted set of antitrust suits the government was litigating (on which more later). In 1962, however, McDonald successfully sued GM to permit publication, retaining an attorney who would go on to become the head of the American Civil Liberties Union. Peter Drucker was asked to provide a forward to the 1972 reprint of My Years with General Motors. Entirely ignorant of the actual genesis of the book, he expresses his dismay that it mentions him and The Concept of the Corporation not at all. Sloan’s book, he thinks, was written as a response to his own. It is ironic, then, that Sloan’s book is actually a de- velopment of Drucker’s ideas, by way of Alfred Chandler (McDonald 2002; McKenna 2006).