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At the Top. It is good management that has done it. Though they would rather submit to the thumbscrew than say so publicly, executives of rival auto companies privately concede the superiority of G.M.'s organization. Says one Detroit titan famed for his aggressive competition with G.M.: "General Motors is the best managed organization in American industry—or, for that matter, anywhere in the world." Says another Big Three executive: "The General Motors system is so well thought out that you could run almost any business in any field successfully by using the G.M. philosophy, method and standards of organizational living."
Even Frederic Donner, a man with an ingrained horror of boasting or "putting on side," lapses into superlatives when he talks of his company. Says he: "We lead the industry in plant, in engineering organization and in dealer organization." And, like everyone else, he attributes G.M.'s pre-eminence to "the System"—a unique blending of centralized policymaking and decentralized execution in which the key decisions are always collective judgments made in committee by some of the best minds in U.S. industry. Says Donner: "It isn't that we just lead miraculously. We have built the facilities to take that leadership."
Never have the G.M. system and the man that heads it been better mated than they are today. When Fred Donner, a trim (5 ft. 9 in., 152 lbs.) and reserved accountant, succeeded flamboyant Harlow Curtice as chief executive in 1958, many an outsider believed that G.M. had turned the driver's seat over to a walking calculator when what the job called for was a sales or production genius. In the three years since, Donner's electronic-quick brain has proved to be everything everyone said of it. (Says Donner of his numbers skill, in characteristic self-deprecation: "Some people can sketch, but to me it comes easily to use figures, almost like a language.") In ultimate tribute to G.M.'s collective judgment, however, Donner has also shown himself deft with people and a first-class administrator. Says one of G.M.'s outside directors: "Fred Donner is the epitome of the G.M. spirit of hard work and analysis. He knows where the company is, where it is going, and how it is going to get there, better than anyone else."
Corsets & Buggy Whips. Since his youth in Three Oaks, Mich. (pop. in 1900: 990), Donner has always seemed to have an uncommonly sure sense of where he was going. The only child of an accountant for the Warren Featherbone Co. (corset stays and buggy whips), young Fred, neighbors recall, "didn't care much for athletics; he read at least two hours a day. And even as a boy he had a routine—so much time for work, so much time for play, so much time for study.''