My Years with General Motors Audiobook By Alfred P. Sloan Jr. cover art

My Years with General Motors

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

My Years with General Motors

By: Alfred P. Sloan Jr.
Narrated by: David Colacci
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $25.79

Buy for $25.79

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

My Years with General Motors became an instant best seller when it was first published in 1963. It has since been used as a manual for managers, offering personal glimpses into the practice of the "discipline of management" by the man who perfected it. This is the story no other businessman could tell - a distillation of half a century of intimate leadership experience with a giant industry and an inside look at dramatic events and creative business management.

Only a handful of business books have reached the status of a classic, having withstood the test of more than 50 years' time. Even today, Bill Gates praises My Years with General Motors as the best book to read on business, and Business Week has named it the number one choice for its "bookshelf of indispensable reading".

©1963; 1990 Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.; Introduction copyright by Peter F. Drucker (P)2019 HighBridge Company Business Professionals & Academics Business Memoirs
Valuable Management Insights • Fascinating Industry History • Perfect Narrator • Captivating Business Drama
Highly rated for:
All stars
Most relevant  
It is a great look behind the scenes of General Motors from the beginning and how what they did lead the industry to where it is today

Very insightful

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Outstanding. After 4O years in the “corporate world” this book threads everything together. Read this Book!

I wish I read this book before I decided to not get my MBA

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Sloan is a great writer and provides valuable insights into the formation of the ziti industry and GM. Hard to believe but GM sold more cars in the US in 1920 than Tesla did using robotics in 2020, 100 years later. If you’ve never heard of Charles Kettering you will live his genius as told by Sloan.

Classic management book and historical insights into the formation of the auto industry.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I’d heard this was an important book on management. I found that to be true. So many examples of innovating in an unknown field; I never even thought about the issues he faced...most challenges he faced are things we’ve long taken for granted. Some chapters were a little dry and I sympathized with the narrator at times. But overall a good book that will make you think about the field of organizational management and force you to ask yourself, “What would I have done?”

Great history of the US auto industry

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Book with a lot of lessons spanning an incredible period of industrialism. The semi autobiographical format makes the volume hard to swallow but after digesting some details, there's much to be gained in terms of understanding the GM management model.

Tough reading, scattered insights

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Fascinating history of GM, the auto industry, and the management of large organizations. Should be required reading for all current and future business executives.

Fascinating

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is well known as an essential (but frankly aged and in some ways quite obsolete) management treatise, but I'm not sure that's why I personally find it so great. At this point in time, it may actually function better as an insider's reflections on the early days of the auto industry, but there is something about ghost writer John McDonald's prose that captures the essentially 19th century nature of Sloan that is just captivating. A fundamentally heartless man (he had an adding machine where that organ is supposed to be) is somehow rendered as a far more complete individual, despite his relentless focus on business, business, business to the exclusion of virtually everything else. It's quite a literary trick. I've listened to the recording half a dozen times and still find it remarkably engaging. The early chapters about how Durant went out and Dupont/Sloan came in are riveting drama. David Colacci is the perfect narrator for this material. If you find this book valuable, engaging or both, read John McDonald's A Ghost's Memoir, about the rather incredible lawsuit that led to its publication years after it was finished, over the dead bodies of GM lawyers that were sure it would lead to an anti-trust conviction.

I wish it were longer

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Sloan takes the reader through how GM developed systems for dealing with organizational opportunities faced during his tenure. Have read about 100 biographies and this stands out because of how ubiquitous much of his reasoning has become for large corporations. While sometimes a bit dry, the content is quite strong and has stood the test of time well. Feel a lot of insights were gained in the reading.

Interesting read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I’ve been looking forward to this book coming to Audible for quite some time, but I was initially bored with seemingly tedious details on the car industry in the early 20th century.

As I read more, that initial boredom turned to awe as I started to appreciate the clarity with which Sloan grasped all aspects of GM’s business at a time when it was one of the most important companies in the world. Im sure many longtime CEOs know a tremendous amount about their businesses, but Sloan was remarkable for his ability to abstract away the particulars and create a fundamental theory of the firm.

Enduring Management Lessons Despite Outdated Information

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
mainly fine business details. the book goes pretty deep into policy detail. there are a few interesting stories throughout though

heavy policy content

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews