Sloan became the boss of General Motors in the early 1920.GM had been started by the US businessman, Billy Durant. Durant collected companies like some people collect stamps. He owned companies that made everything from cars to fridges. He thought that if he owned enough companies, one or two of them were certain to be successful.

Unfortunately, he was wrong. Because although he was good at buying companies, he was useless at managing them. In fact, Durant was such a difficult man that he lost all his best employees, including some of the most famous names in the car business.

Walter Chrysler worked for Durant for a time but he soon left and started the successful Chrysler Corporation. Another employee was sacked because he smoked a cigarette in Durant's office. His name was Louis Chevrolet. By 1920, General Motors was in a mess. It employed too many people, it had too many managers, it made too many kinds of cars and it was losing lots of money. Even Billy Durant realized that it couldn't continue.

So he sold GM to one of the great names of early US business, Pierre du Pont. Du Pont could see that GM showed promise, but it needed a good manager. So du Pont turned to Alfred Sloan. At the time, Sloan was forty-three years old and he was already a great success. He had started twenty years before, when he borrowed $5,000 from his father and bought a company called Hyatt.

Hyatt did not look like a very good business. It made small metal balls that were used in trains and other vehicles and it was making no more than $2,000 a month. But Sloan was confident that he could turn Hyatt into a success. He talked to all the important people in the USA's car business and learnt as much as possible about making cars.

Before long Hyatt was making profits of over $4 million a year. When Sloan arrived at General Motors, he saw immediately that he needed to organize the company in a new way. At that time, General Motors was producing eight different cars but had only 12 per cent of the car market.