Everyone before Sloan had seen the problem as one of personalities, to be solved through a struggle for power from which one man would emerge victorious. Sloan saw it as a constitutional problem to be solved through a new structure; decentralization which balances local autonomy in operations with central control of direction and policy.
Good description here:
Upper management focuses on high-level priorities, themes, directions, etc. Lower management, under these constraints, then sets lower-level priorities, themes, directions etc. to workers. The workers in turn still have plenty of freedom to maneuver within these narrower constraints to get the job done in the manner they see best fit.
