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The G.M. committee system has the sound of bureaucracy but is saved from stultification by the drive and competitive urge of the line divisions. The decision to build the compact rear-engine Corvair in 1959 took G.M.'s committees about four months to approve. But the fact that the Corvair was built at all was due to the initiative of then Chevrolet Division Chief Edward Cole (TIME cover, Oct. 5, 1959), who on his own time put together plans for the car long before he had any authorization at all. "Let's face it," sighs a rival automaker. "That big G.M. animal has a fantastic response mechanism."
The response mechanism has not always been infallible. In 1957, when G.M.'s committees might have been concerned with the mounting sales of compacts, they decided instead that the wave of the future lay in Chrysler's finny "Forward Look" cars. G.M. rushed into a crash restyling program, came up with spangled 1959 models that, by G.M. standards, sold poorly. Even more serious were the design troubles of the Buick division in the late 1950s. Sales plummeted, and Buick's dip was not corrected until the System rushed in to provide Buick with new management and new engineers. But the System's response, if belated, was highly successful. Last year's Buicks were conceded even by rival automakers to be the best-engineered cars out of Detroit.
Two for Every Opening. Awed by G.M.'s effectiveness, many another U.S. corporation has tried to emulate the Sloan system-but rarely with comparable success. One reason is that few other companies can match the planning and control system installed at G.M. by Vice President Donaldson Brown just a year before Donner was hired. The Brown system of constant reports—which permits G.M. to forecast for three months in advance every detail of its operations from auto production to profit margins—has for 37 years kept G.M.'s profits moving up at a planned pace in relation to sales. (G.M. showed its last loss—$38.7 million—in 1921.) Only one other major U.S. corporation has such a record: Du Pont—whose planning and control system Donaldson Brown devised before he moved to G.M.
Another vital G.M. legacy from the Sloan era is G.M.'s overriding emphasis on a strong, healthily prosperous dealer organization. Sloan picked his dealers carefully, watched over their accounting methods, and saw to it that they were all geographically spaced to divide the market properly. After the 1955 auto glut—when the company was accused of forcing so many cars on dealers that they had to dump them at almost any price—G.M., with prompting from the Senate's O'Mahoney subcommittee, further improved its dealer relations. It extended dealer contracts from one year to five, hired an ex-judge to decide disagreements between the company and its dealers, and set up elected dealer councils to thresh out problems with company brass. The result is that today G.M.'s 13,800 U.S. dealerships are prized possessions. Says San Francisco Chevy Dealer Ellis Brooks: "Getting a Chevrolet franchise is the dream of everybody in the business."