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Divided Rule. Donner signaled the way he would run the company by picking as president crack engineer John F. Gordon, 62, previously vice president in charge of the Body and Assembly Group, Donner and Gordon have never set down on paper any formal division of authority, and feel no need to. "I don't spend the hours on styling that he does," explains Donner. "He does not spend the hours on finance and labor relations that I do. In some areas like distribution we are both active." In everything they work closely together, spending many evenings together over dinner in New York or Detroit—where Gordon is based. "We see each other three weeks out of four," says Donner, "and we have gotten to instinctively recognize anything we ought to talk over before one of us moves in on it alone, or a committee takes action."
From the System's standpoint, the arrangement could not be better. Exults one G.M. director, Morgan Guaranty Trust Chairman Henry Clay Alexander: "There's no sense of jealousy, never a question as to who goes through the door first or who sits at the head of the table." In the Detroit board room, in fact, Donner and Gordon sit side by side at the head of the table—with Donner presiding.
The Little Betters. Even critics of the System acknowledge that General Motors is performing at its best under Donner's orchestrated leadership. Admits one Big Three executive, who hotly denies that G.M. has any monopoly on automotive brains: "Year in and year out over the last decade, General Motors has been a little better than the rest of us in some of the major areas—in distribution or product, in management or styling. This happens to be the year when all the 'little betters' coincided."
A major reason for the coincidence of all the "little betters" this year is that G.M.'s committees simply did not make as many wrong decisions as their rivals did. Donner crows a bit over Ford's last-minute cancellation of U.S. production of the Cardinal after plowing $11 million into development of the much-rumored "compact compact." He implies that G.M.'s insistence on careful evaluation of mountains of fact made clear to him and his colleagues that there was no great demand for such a car. Says he: "We have not found a way to make a small, small car large and comfortable—which seems to be what the customer now wants." G.M.'s committees, in fact, have never quite believed that the compact boom of the late '50s marked the death of the American car buyer's traditional urge to move up to higher-priced cars. For a time, this skepticism seemed likely to lead G.M. into serious trouble. In 1959, when Ford's compact Falcon scored an immediate success while Chevrolet's rear-engine Corvair was something of a dud, it appeared that Ford might grab off the lion's share of an important new market. Almost by chance, however, Chevrolet dressed up some Corvairs with pizazz features to attract customers into showrooms to look at the ordinary Corvair. With that began the Monza and the "bucket seat boom" —another example of the auto buyer's old urge to upgrade the plain and the practical.