Alfred P. Sloan citations
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Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. fut un homme d'affaires américain, président de General Motors pendant près de 30 ans de 1923 à 1956. On se souvient de Sloan aujourd'hui avec un mélange complexe d'admiration pour ses réalisations, d'appréciation pour sa philanthropie et de malaise ou de reproche concernant ses attitudes pendant l'entre-deux-guerres et la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

Théoricien du management, auteur et philanthrope. Wikipedia  

✵ 23. mai 1875 – 17. février 1966
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Alfred P. Sloan: 47   citations 0   J'aime

Alfred P. Sloan: Citations en anglais

“I had taken up the question of interdivisional relations with Mr. Durant [president of GM at the time] before I entered General Motors and my views on it were well enough known for me to be appointed chairman of a committee "to formulate rules and regulations pertaining to interdivisional business" on December 31, 1918. I completed the report by the following summer and presented it to the Executive Committee on December 6, 1919. I select here a few of its first principles which, though they are an accepted part of management doctrine today, were not so well known then. I think they are still worth attention.
I stated the basic argument as follows:
The profit resulting from any business considered abstractly, is no real measure of the merits of that particular business. An operation making $100,000.00 per year may be a very profitable business justifying expansion and the use of all the additional capital that it can profitably employ. On the other hand, a business making $10,000,000 a year may be a very unprofitable one, not only not justifying further expansion but even justifying liquidation unless more profitable returns can be obtained. It is not, therefore, a matter of the amount of profit but of the relation of that profit to the real worth of invested capital within the business. Unless that principle is fully recognized in any plan that may be adopted, illogical and unsound results and statistics are unavoidable …”

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 49

“Bedside manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis.”

Alfred P. Sloan, quoted in: The Almanac of Quotable Quotes from 1990. (1991), p. 103

“What has taken place is a shift of business from one manufacturer to another, and the announcements in the press as well as the general publicity of those manufacturers who have succeeded in increasing their business give, I think, the impression that this is true of the whole industry. If we could assume, for the sake of argument, that we will reach the point at which twenty-five million cars and trucks will be registered in the United States an assumption that from what we have accomplished so far is certainly perfectly reasonable then I think we could safely say that the replacement demand, plus the export demand which will increase for many years yet, plus the normal growth, would amount to something like four to four and one half million vehicles a year and would require the manufacture of a number of cars equal to or greater than has yet been produced in any year in the history of the industry…
I am sure that I do not need to elaborate what the automotive industry consists of, its influence on the prosperity of the United States, the influence that it has had in many other industries which contribute to its production necessities. General Motors is an important part of this great industry of ours and as my contribution to your visit with us I would like to tell you in a brief way something about General Motors; how we are thinking, what we are doing, and our ambitions for the future.”

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 332-3: Speech by President Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., 1927 (II)

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