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The best of all Sloan's bearing customers was William Crapo Durant, who was trying to assemble a motley collection of auto companies into a corporation he called General Motors. Durant was also tying his suppliers together as United Motors Corp., bought Hyatt for $13.5 million as part of United. Durant had taken such a fancy to Sloan that he hired him to become United's president. United was eventually merged into General Motors and Durant was ousted by the Du Pont family, already large G.M. stockholders. New President Pierre S. Du Pont asked Sloan to stay as operations vice president; he had undoubtedly been influenced by Du Pont Director John J. Raskob. "There," said Raskob about Sloan, "is a man who should be President of the United States. He never will, because he is not colorful enough."
When Pierre Du Pont retired from G.M.'s presidency, Sloan was his natural successor. He took over a sprawling infant that made five nonintegrated car lines, ran such supply companies as Fisher Body and United Motors with little thought of inventory control, cached its cash wherever division man agers wanted to keep it. Sloan set up a seemingly contradictory system: a committee management in which operations were decentralized, finances and policy centralized. Above it all was "Mr. Sloan," as he was always called.
Golden Rule. When Sloan became president, the company had 12% of the U.S. auto market; when he stepped out as chairman, it had 52%. G.M. never skipped a dividend—Sloan's golden rule was that profits were worth nothing if they were not passed on to shareholders. At the time of his death, he was the largest shareholder, with more than 690,000 shares.
Sloan's management extended far beyond New York and Detroit. He spent much time on the road, traveled in a private railroad car to call on G.M. dealers large and small, seeking out their advice and complaints—and in the process, building the auto industry's strongest dealer network. He also moved G.M. overseas, buying such subsidiaries as Britain's Vauxhall and Germany's Opel, and he diversified General Motors into the manufacture of nonauto products ranging from refrigerators to diesel locomotives.
Work Hard. For all his prestige and power, Sloan never really became a personage to the public. "Mr. Sloan is coming out with a new car with an Indian name—Pontiac," cracked Will Rogers. "Mr. Ford and Mr. Chrysler have automobiles named after them. All Mr. Sloan has is a liniment."
Mr. Sloan preferred it that way. Though he was friend and adviser to U.S. Presidents, he treated them with the same cool courtesy that he showed toward used-car dealers. He carefully answered all letters that came to him, but, whether to a close friend or perfect stranger, he always signed himself as "Alfred P. Sloan." In his autobiography, My Years with General Motors, which started as a series of articles in FORTUNE and became a book that sold 50,000 copies, he passed on to would-be tycoons his secrets of success. "Keep an open mind," he wrote, "and work hard. The last is most important of all. There is no short cut."