# Quote — Alfred Sloan, My Years with General Motors

> I had trouble at first, in the early 1900s, in selling Mr. Leland our roller bearings. He then taught me the need for greater accuracy in our products to meet the exacting standards of interchangeable parts. Mr. Leland came to the industry with a mature experience in general engineering and in gasoline engines, which he had long made for boats. One of his specialties was precision metalwork, which went back to his experience in toolmaking for a federal arsenal during the Civil War, and which he afterward developed in the Brown and Sharpe Company, machine-tool makers of Providence, Rhode Island. It has been called to my attention It has been called to my attention that Eli Whitney, long before, had started the development of interchangeable parts, a fact which suggests a line of descent from Whitney to Leland to the automobile industry.

- 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: 20
- 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/i-had-trouble

## 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)