# Quote — Alfred Sloan, My Years with General Motors

> By The middle of The 1920s General Motors had accomplished some things, but apart from survival and reorganization, they were more in the realm of the mind than of reality. We knew, as I have related, the strategy with which we proposed to approach the car business, how we proposed to manage the enterprise financially, and the relationships we wanted to establish among persons in different roles. But by the end of 1924 little of this was reflected in Our activities in the automobile market. That our volume of business had increased after the slump of 1921 — and especially in 1923 — could be attributed less to our own wits than to the improvement in the general economy and the rising demand for automobiles. While internally we had made much progress, externally we had marked time. But the time had come to act.

- Author: [Alfred Sloan](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alfred-sloan.md)
- Book: [My Years with General Motors](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alfred-sloan/my-years-with-general-motors.md)
- Page: 149
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_P._Sloan#My_Years_with_General_Motors,_1963) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/alfred-sloan/my-years-with-general-motors/by-the-middle

## More from this book

> Competition is the final price determinant and competitive prices may result in profits which force you to accept a rate of return less than you hoped for, or for that matter to accept temporary losses. And, in times of inflation, the rate-of-return concept comes up against the problem of assets undervalued in terms of replacement. Nevertheless, no other financial principle with which I am acquainted serves better than rate of return as an objective aid to business judgment. This principle had governed the thinking of the Finance Committee of General Motors since 1917.

p. 140 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alfred-sloan/my-years-with-general-motors/competition-is-the.md)

> I am sure we all realize that this struggle that is going on though the World is really nothing more or less than a conflict between two opposing technocracies manifesting itself to the capitalization of economic resources and products and all that sort of thing.

p. 438 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alfred-sloan/my-years-with-general-motors/i-am-sure.md)

> The transformation of the automobile market was essentially complete in 1929. If Mr. Ford, in that pivotal year in the modern economy, still held stubbornly to his old concept in his new Model A, he was counterbalanced by Mr. Chrysler, who had come up from nowhere with tremendous vitality and with a market policy similar to General Motors'. The fact that Mr. Ford built nearly two million of the five million U.S.-produced cars and trucks sold that year was only incidental from the long-term point of view. it was a splurge, not the sign of a trend.

p. 169 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alfred-sloan/my-years-with-general-motors/the-transformation-of-the.md)