The greatest real thrill that life offers is to create, to construct, to develop something useful. Too often we fail to recognize and pay tribute to the creative spirit. It is that spirit that creates our jobs.
Alfred P. Sloan Quotes
There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different.
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| Birth: | 23rd May, 1875 |
| Death: | 17th February, 1966 |
| Nationality: | American |
| Profession: | Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, President |
About
Sloan was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He studied electrical engineering and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1895. While attending MIT he joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity.
He became president and owner of Hyatt Roller Bearing, a company that made roller and ball bearings, in 1899. In 1916 Hyatt merged with other companies into United Motors Company, which soon became part of General Motors Corporation. Sloan became Vice-President of GM, then President (1923), and finally Chairman of the Board (1937). In 1934, he established the philanthropic, nonprofit Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. GM under Sloan became famous for managing diverse operations with financial statistics such as return on investment; these measures were introduced to GM by Donaldson Brown, a protege of GM vice-president John J. Raskob. Raskob came to GM as an advisor to Pierre S. du Pont and the du Pont corporation; the latter was a principal investor in GM whose executives largely ran GM in the 1920s.
In 1951, Sloan received The Hundred Year Association of New York's Gold Medal Award "in recognition of outstanding contributions to the City of New York." Sloan maintained an office in 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Rockefeller Center, now known as the GE Building. He retired as GM chairman on April 2, 1956. His memoir and management treatise, My Years with General Motors, was more or less finished around this time; but its publication was held up for nearly a decade longer by GM's legal staff, who feared that it would be used to support an antitrust case against GM. It was finally published in 1964.
Sloan died in 1966.
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