General Motors
General Motors has announced a new business group called e-GM that will offer GM customers a range of GM products and integrated services through electronic malls.
The war years made GM rich, but its wealth became unprecedented in the 1950s with a combination of pent-up demand, the need for a car for suburban living, and the coming of the interstate highway system. In addition to lobbying for the automobile as the mode of transportation for Americans, GM also did its best to destroy the competition. In 1949, GM, Standard Oil, Firestone, and other companies were convicted of criminal conspiracy to replace electric transit lines with gasoline or diesel buses. GM had replaced more than one hundred electric transit systems in forty-five cities with GM buses. Despite a fine and the court ruling, GM would, with the aid of urban planners like Robert Moses, block efforts at mass transit.
If Ford created modern manufacturing techniques (Fordism) to conquer the massive scale of making automobiles, then Sloan created management techniques (Sloanism) to master the managing of a large-scale firm. Sloan's management ideas on hierarchical line authority became the model for all large corporations for years. Sloan also became the first GM president to engage in collective bargaining when the United Auto Workers staged a series of successful sit-down strikes in GM plants in Flint, Michigan, in 1937. But Sloan's greatest triumph was his creation of a styling and color department under the direction of designer Harley Earl in 1927. From this concentration on styling, thus on marketing, GM cemented in the American psyche the fact that, according to David Halberstam, “the car was not merely transportation, but a reflection of status, a concept to which most Americans responded enthusiastically as they strove to move up into the middle class, and then the upper middle class.” With the annual model changes–which were often only cosmetically different from the previous year–new car buyers were hooked. It was Sloan and Durant's vision of a car for every market niche: new car buyers could start cheap with a Chevy and then, as they earned more, work their way up to an Olds, and everyone would dream of owning a Cadillac.