A Ghost's Memoir ― The Making of Alfred P. Sloan's My Years With General Motors

Published in 1964, My Years with General Motors was an immediate best-seller andtoday is considered one of the few classic books on management. The book is the ghostwritten memoirof Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. (1875-1966), whose business and management strategies enabled General Motorsto overtake Ford as the dominant American automobile manufacturer in the 1920s and 1930s.What hasbeen largely unknown until now is that My Years with General Motors was almost not published.Although it was written with the permission of General Motors -- and slated for publication inOctober 1959 -- at the last minute General Motors tried to suppress the book out of fears that someof the material in it could become evidence in an antitrust action against the company. This book,by John McDonald, Sloan's ghostwriter, tells the behind-the-scenes story of the book's writing, itsattempted suppression, and the lawsuit that eventually led to its publication. McDonald's narrativeis partly the David-and-Goliath story of a lone journalist taking on the world's then-largestcorporation and partly a study of strategy in its own right. McDonald's struggle to publish the bookled him to navigate a complicated course among the competing interests of General Motors, Fortunemagazine (his employer), and Time, Inc. (Fortune's owner). In many ways this "book about the book"parallels the Sloan book as a tale of successful, brilliantly planned strategy.

John McDonald (1906-1998) was an editor and writer for Fortune magazine for three decades and the ghostwriter for Alfred P. Sloan's My Years with General Motors. He was also the author of books on business, game theory, and fly fishing.