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Redheaded Energy. Billy Durant endowed G.M. with optimism (1921 was G.M.'s only deficit year), a reputation for good automobiles, a flair for sales, and a spirit of unsophisticated boldness and high adventure that is still the hallmark of Detroit. The man who cast G.M. in its present mold is Alfred P. Sloan Jr., an engineer by training and an organizational genius by instinct. He became president five years after his company (United Motors) was merged with G.M. With him he brought a new concept of decentralized organization that is probably as significant to the science of corporation management today as the U.S. Federal system is to political life. Sloan bred independence and intramural competition, handsomely rewarded hard work and the inquiring spirit. He welded all these diverse talents into a powerful management team that was designed to develop leaders just as engineers develop cars. As G.M.'s eleventh president, Harlow Curtice is as surely a product of General Motors as Dwight Eisenhower is of the U.S. Army.
Curtice brought little but redheaded energy with him when, with only a business-school education, he landed a job in Flint, Mich, as a bookkeeper for the AC Spark Plug Division of G.M. in 1914. His energetic curiosity led him behind the ledger down into the plant, to find out what his figures meant in terms of men and production. In a year he knew AC so well that, at 21, he was made comptroller. At 36 he was AC's president and one of G.M.'s junior-grade hot prospects. Put in charge of ailing Buick, he pulled the division out of a mid-depression slump, ran it through the war years. It was the fourth-biggest-selling car when he was boosted to a G.M. vice presidency. In 1948, as the postwar market got rolling, G.M. President Charles Wilson made Curtice an executive vice president. Three years ago, when Charlie Wilson went to Washington to be Secretary of Defense, Red Curtice, at 59, became president. His current salary, plus bonuses: more than $800,000 a year.
"The rough process of elimination at G.M.," says a knowing competitor, "absolutely prevents a phony from getting that job."
Legitimate Prince. Curtice would be the first to snort at the suggestion that he is a throwback to Billy Durant—because his Sloan-bred sense of organization rebels at the memory of Durant's wild and woolly ways. But Curtice, the corporate statesman, and Durant, the irrepressible, share an uncanny instinct when it comes to the average American's feelings about automobiles—an even sharper sense than the engineering-minded presidents between the two who developed the annual model change and the customer research system. Curtice is generally typed as a supersalesman, but he is much more: he is the legitimate prince of the auto buyers, in close communion with his subjects, the size of their garages, their chance for advancement (say, from Chevrolet to Pontiac), their bank accounts, and the exact degree of new styling, e.g., the panoramic windshield required to make them accidentally stop by a dealer to see how much he might give on the old car.