# Quote — Alfred Sloan, My Years with General Motors

> My father was in the wholesale tea, coffee, and cigar business, with a firm called Bennett-Sloan and Company. In 1885 he moved the business to New York City, on West Broadway, and from the age of ten I grew up in Brooklyn. I am told I still have the accent. My father's father was a schoolteacher. My mother's father was a Methodist minister. My parents had five children, of whom I am the oldest. There is my sister, Mrs. Katharine Sloan Pratt, now a widow. There are my three brothers — Clifford, who was in the advertising business; Harold, a college professor; and Raymond, the youngest, who is a professor, writer, and expert on hospital administration. I think we have all had in common a capability for being dedicated to our respective interests.

- 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: 37
- 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/my-father-was

## 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)