Alfred Sloan’s "My Years with General Motors" (1963) is rightly regarded as one of the best books on business. It also contains one of the most intriguing sentences on management. Sloan says that his overriding aim in running General Motors, which he did from 1923 to 1956, was to transform the company into "an objective organization, as distinguished from the type that get lost in the subjectivity of personalities.”

This sentence is intriguing for two reasons. It sums up one of the great themes of the first 70 years of the 20th century — the construction of "objective organizations” in business and politics. It also points forward to the great problem of our own time. For everywhere we look, from business to politics, from the U.S. to Russia, we see "objective organizations” breaking down and "the subjectivity of personalities” on the rampage.

Sloan believed that the empires built by the business giants of the second half of the 19th century needed radical reform. Carnegie and Rockefeller might have possessed a unique ability to create something out of nothing, but what the business world needed now was a more mundane ability: managerial competence. Sloan was particularly worried that the last of the great robber barons, Henry Ford, was running his company into the ground, shifting from one whim to another and presenting GM with an antitrust problem.

© The Japan Times