A few things our generals could learn from Alfred Sloan’s history of General Motors

For
the most part, I do not believe that the military should imitate business. The
differences are too big, especially the risks: In wartime you risk lives, while
in business you generally risk filing for bankruptcy. Hence the inclination in
business to go for the 51 percent solution, which I think is generally too
dangerous in military operations. 

That
said, there are some parallels that illuminate situations. For example, Alfred
Sloan, in his autobiographical history My Years With General Motors,
which I just finished, makes a sharp distinction between what General Motors
did every day and what it sold. What it did was cut and bend metal. What it
sold was not basic transportation (from the mid-1920s on, he said, that was the
job of the used car market, and so not his business), but instead a form of
more expensive transportation -- a new car that offered style, speed, and
comfort. This is the departure point in strategy: Figuring out you who
are.   

One
thing that struck me reading it is that Flint and Detroit in the 1910s were a
lot like Silicon Valley in the 1980s, with Sloan hanging out on weekends with
Walter Chrysler, Charles Nash, and the like.

Sloan placed an enormous emphasis on running the company with
centralized policy and de-centralized execution. This strikes me as another way
of saying "mission orders." It is a lot harder than it looks. Much of the book
depicts how he went about implementing this. 
The line guys had genuine power, the staff guys only the power to make
recommendations.

As
part of that, he developed the sense of a corporate need for what military
people call "doctrine." In explaining the structure he devised for General
Motors, he writes, "The Operations committee was not a policy-making body but a
forum for the discussion of policy or of need for policy. . . . In a large
enterprise some means is necessary to bring about a common understanding."
That's a good layman's explanation of doctrine, in a military sense.

Details
also matter, and understanding your process. One of the biggest problems in the
automobile industry is managing inventory, even now.
It used to be that one of the slow points in moving inventory was waiting an
average of three weeks for paint and varnish to dry and cure. It also took up a
lot of real estate. Du Pont (a major investor in GM) invented a new lacquer
process that allowed a car to be finished in one eight-hour shift.

Finally,
the book reminds me of war in that it consists of long boring sections
interrupted by points of brilliance.

Two WWII bonus facts: I didn't know that the
tail fins of Cadillacs and other automobiles of the 1950s were directly
inspired by the P-38. Nor did I know that the price of a GM-made .50 caliber
machine gun fell from $689 on Dec. 7, 1941, to a low of $169 in the fall of
1944. (As production numbers were cut after that, the price rose $5.) So I
guess that the better we were doing, the cheaper the .50 cal usually was.