The SUPPRESSION BY GENERAL MOTORS of My Years with General Motors

MY YEARS WITH GENERAL MOTORS was suppressed from publication for five years due to GM counsel’s fear that the detailed story of the company’s climb to industry domination would spark government anti-trust action.

GM had operated under the threat of anti-trust action since after World War II. The situation was exacerbated in the mid-fifties as the remaining independent auto manufacturers, including AMC (Hudson-Nash), Studebaker, Packard, Kaiser-Frazer, became less and less able to compete with the Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler). In 1957, the government’s successful action against the DuPont corporation forced the chemical giant to divest its large stake in GM.

Caught between GM’s lawyers’ assertion that “The General Motors Story” (MY YEARS’ working title) would “destroy the company” on one hand, and his own commitment to the book’s instructional value, the aged Sloan was stymied. He left it to his co-author, Fortune magazine writer John McDonald to fight for publication. McDonald undertook an epic “David and Goliath” battle with GM, made even harder by his own employer, Time-Life, Inc., who feared that GM would pull its advertisements from its magazines.

McDonald (and Sloan) prevailed, and MY YEARS WITH GENERAL MOTORS was published in December, 1963. It became an instant bestseller, bested only by several books on the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy. MY YEARS endures as one of the small handful of timeless books on management.

The 1990 updated edition of MY YEARS included a new Introduction by management guru Peter Drucker, entitled “Why MY YEARS WITH GENERAL MOTORS is must reading.” In what is otherwise a typically lucid essay, Drucker, in addressing the little-known publication delay, inexplicably invented nonsensical reasons for it. John McDonald, who had quickly moved beyond the original battle, found Drucker’s inaccurate claims unacceptable. In 1998, McDonald published his own detailed memoir of the events, A Ghost’s Memoir.