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He does not boss his army of 380,000 employees entirely from a desk. Last year, to get more steel, he grabbed his hat, packed a bag and hotfooted it to Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Manhattan to haggle with steelmen. By a shrewd deal, he got promises of extra steel in 1949, and in return, promised to move some Fisher Body operations to Pittsburgh to give steelmen a local market that will remain when demand falls off.
The Right Card. A shrewd poker and bridge player, Wilson plays his best when the stakes are high. He can sit down with as canny a bargainer as U.A.W.'s President Walter Reuther, and come out with his shirt on. Once he accepted Reuther's challenge to a public debate; the jury of newsmen, who had expected persuasive Walter Reuther to triumph easily, thought Wilson held him to a draw. "I get along with Mr. Reuther as well as anyone on my side of the table," Wilson said recently, "and considerably better than some on his side."
It was Wilson who thought up G.M.'s plan to gear hourly rates to the cost-of-living index, as in the present U.A.W. contract. Labor liked the idea (it got a 14¢-an-hour raise). It was also good business: in March, wages will probably go down 1¢ an hour to match the cost-of-living drop. The motive behind Wilson's proposal was typical of his economic philosophy that wage hikes or cuts should follow cost-of-living changes, not cause them.
Do Not Disturb. In his austere, 14th-floor corner office in Detroit's General Motors Building (it overlooks U.A.W.'s headquarters across the street), C.E. works between a rolltop desk and a flat desk, two telephones at his elbow and five briefcases at his feet. As he chain-smokes Chesterfields, he often makes and takes his own phone calls. Many a junior executive in an outlying plant of G.M.'s empire has picked up a phone to hear: "This is C.E. ... I want. . ."
To get around the curse of bigness, C.E. allows his divisions* wide autonomy. The overall policymaking is done by G.M.'s 16 committees and subcommittees. As chairman of the potent operations policy committee and member of several others, Wilson has a strong voice in making the decisions, and is often the man who takes over after the meeting and gets them carried out. Even though he largely leaves corporate finance to the New York office and Board Chairman Sloan, Wilson's workload of running everything else is immense.
When he wants to be alone, he strides down the hall with an armload of papers, takes over a private dining room, and the word goes out: do not disturb. Executives dread the 5 p.m. "stand by" orders that chain them, fidgeting, to their desks while C.E., oblivious to time, gets ready to summon them. After they do leave, Wilson spends many a lonely night in the corporation's living suites in the building, curled up before a fireplace with homework that is too pressing to take home. To save time, he makes the 20-mile trip home only two or three nights a week.