He became president of a machine shop making ball bearings in 1899. In 1916 and 1918, his company merged with United Motors Corporation and with another company to form General Motors Corporation, which started making cars. He became Vice-President, then President (1923), and finally Chairman of the Board (1937). In 1934, he established the philanthropic nonprofit Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. GM was the first company to coin the word return on investment. This performance rating may have been introduced to GM by Donaldson Brown, a Delaware farm boy who ended in GM after secretly marrying Eleuthère Irénée du Pont's daughter.
Under Alfred P. Sloan's leadership, public transport systems of trams in the US were successively replaced by buses. Many of the trams themselves were literally burnt in order to prevent any reversal in public transport policies. Frequencies of bus services were decreased on less profitable routes, helping to encourage people to buy their own automobiles and travel independently.
In these ways and others, Alfred P. Sloan continued to increase GM's profitability.
Sloan retired as chairman on April 2, 1956 and died in 1966.
External links
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, whose total assets had a market value of over $1.3 billion in 2002 (http://www.sloan.org)
review of Klein and Olson's film Taken for a Ride (http://www.interactivist.net/transportation/ride.html)
contribution of Alfred P. Sloan to changes in rapid transit systems (http://rapidtransit.com/net/thirdrail/9905/agt4.htm)
extract from Bradford C. Snell, American Ground Transport: A Proposal for Restructuring the Automobile, Truck, Bus and Rail Industries. Report presented to the Committee of the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, United States Senate, February 26, 1974, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1974, pp. 16-24. (http://www.corpwatch.org/campaigns/PCD.jsp?articleid=4368)
The purpose of the Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) is to help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.
Created with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Sloan-C encourages the collaborative sharing of knowledge and effective practices to improve online education in learning effectiveness, access, affordability for learners and providers, and student and faculty satisfaction.
The Effective Practice Awards were nominated by the Sloan Consortium Effective Practice Editors and selected by a panel of expert practitioners in the field of online learning.
Sloan was averse to violence of the sort associated with Henry Ford.
A Sloan Foundation grant established the MIT School of Industrial Management in 1952 with the charge of educating the "ideal manager", and the school was renamed in Sloan's honor as the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, one of the world's premier business schools.
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