America’s Big Personalities Are Shrinking Its Greatness

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 Co., 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 US to Russia, we see “objective organizations” breaking down and “the subjectivity of personalities” on the rampage.