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Above all, however, what makes the System work with unparalleled effectiveness is its tradition of aggressive informality. This is possible because almost all G.M.'s top officers have been working together all their business lives. The company's top 500 executives have put in an average of 30 years apiece with G.M., and it is a rare G.M. executive who jumps to another company—partly because G.M. pays them to stay with salaries that have become industrial legend. Headed by Donner, who drew total earnings of $557,725 before taxes, eight of the ten highest-paid men in U.S. industry last year were G.M. officers. Result is that G.M. is able to keep a reserve bench of executive talent that no other auto company—and probably no other company in any industry—can match. Almost offhandedly Donner says: "We try to keep a manpower pool which is a bit more than twice as large as the number of jobs which it will fill."
The Expert. Despite its superabundance of manpower, G.M. puts scant stock in seniority, has a tradition that anyone who is going to the top begins his rise early. And from the start of his G.M. career. Fred Donner was clearly a comer. Though he has always been attached to the financial staff in New York, his ability to cut through a tangle of conflicting evidence quickly made him a key man in G.M.'s endless process of self-examination, and took him into almost every cranny of the corporation from the dealer organization to overseas operations. "Mr. Sloan emphasized two things," says Donner. "One—get the facts. Two—recognize the equities of all concerned."
The young Donner of the 1930s sometimes annoyed his associates. "His main difficulty back there," says a former boss, "was that he expected everyone to be as smart as he was." But by the time he was 39, Donner was already vice president in charge of financial staff—one of the youngest men the System has ever promoted to such high rank. In 1956 he became chairman of the powerful financial policy committee that, in effect, has final say on all G.M. moves. "I felt this was the last job at G.M. I would have," recalls Donner. "It was a very natural spot for me, and I was happy to have it."
Had Harlow Curtice, General Motors' chief executive from 1953 to 1958, been a different kind of man, Donner might have stayed where he was. "Red" Curtice was responsible for some of G.M.'s most brilliant moves (and hardest selling—the record 1955 year was his). But he was an autocrat by temperament, offended against the System by delving deep into the affairs of autonomous divisions, and was even accused of showing favoritism toward the Buick division he had once headed. When Curtice retired at 65, the System was happy to turn to one of its own—a man who respected its committees and had no close ties to any one division. The obvious choice was Fred Donner.