“Alfred Sloan’s Adventures of a White-Collar Man was published in 1940. Much has happened in the intervening decades... One might be forgiven for wondering whether a book written so long ago has anything to offer the modern reader...

Such skepticism would be mistaken.

Adventures is... an epic saga, a rags-to-riches story of a group of plucky eccentrics who, on fire for opportunity, began by building horseless carriages in backyards and toolsheds and ended up — to their own surprise as much as anyone’s — creating a manufacturing juggernaut that dominated the global economy for half a century. Sloan stumbled into the automobile industry when it was still possible to know everybody, and into his recollections walk a cast of characters the modern consumer knows only as brands but who Sloan reminds us were first of all men: Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, Dave Buick, the Dodge Brothers, Eli Olds. It’s a fun ride, an insider’s peek into the chaotic, rickety, wholly improbable beginnings of a new industry before anyone knew what the automobile would become or what it would mean for the world...

In corporate boardrooms across the country, business executives and investors speak reverently to one another of something called the shareholder theory of value...

Alfred Sloan thought differently. The view he articulates in... his story of the automobile industry, is that a business is only incidentally an investment and that only a banker could view it in such terms. In Sloan’s telling, a business is something quite different. A business is a cooperative social enterprise that is there to solve problems...

A second, equally refreshing, piece of Sloan’s theory of the corporation involves its implications about what corporate management should be. Because the corporation exists to solve problems and because problems are solved by human ingenuity, it follows that the well-functioning corporation should be structured to maximize invention, initiative, and imagination.” — Introduction to the 2025 eBook edition by Adam F. Falk, President, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

“For Alfred P. Sloan, top man in General Motors, to call himself a white-collar man, just like that, may savor a bit of understatement. It gives somewhat the sound of an American success story in the Horatio Alger style, which this book is not intended to be. Yet, as you read the hard facts of the growth of the automotive industry to giant proportions with incredible speed, it comes home to you that it is Horatio Alger, after all.” — Henry James Forman, The New York Times