MANAGEMENT: Handicap

Testifying at the Du Pont antitrust trial in Chicago last week, General Motors Chairman Alfred P. Sloan Jr. explained why Charles F. Kettering, the company’s famed research wizard, never made the top policy committee. Sloan said that in 1943 he had proposed that the committee admit “Boss Ket,” who invented the self-starter and helped in the development of many another product (e.g., the high-compression motor, leaded gasoline). But when Du Pont Chairman Lammot du Pont objected, Sloan felt that his reasons were valid. “We agreed,” said Sloan, “that if [Ket] came on the committee, he would be telling us about all the wonderful things that were in the future, and we wouldn’t have time to attend to . . . business.”