Bookstore here in the Renaissance Center, adrienne hecky, i dream coming into the rest of the team at amicom books. Christine durham, the manager here of the Renaissance Center, and finally come ed snider and John Mcdonald of General MotorsCorporate Communications who facilitate of all of the audio and visual set up. As background i but also like to give just a brief summary of my own riding writing credentials. I started writing as a soldier infantryman with a Rifle Company and a heavy order platoon in vietnam. When i came back to the world i wrote the first vietnam lawful posted by a and infantrymen which was nominated for the National Book award and the National Endowment for the arts fellowship. From there, i began writing about vietnam and south asia for the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly and the new republic. From there somehow ended up in the Foreign Service and was at the embassy is in pakistan and venezuela come and then did another vietnam novel called Hamburger Hill in conjunction with a film of the same name. But as they say all roads lead to the trade and i ended up to joining General Motors in 1987 and was soon writing speeches for jack smith who became ceo in 1992 and for john became the chairman of the board of the same year. I left General Motors to return to my own riding fulltime just about four years ago when jack smith retired, and ever since then i have been more less consumed by this latest book. You can ask my wife who i am proud to have with me today. With that background as preface what i would like to do today is offer a few comments on how billy alfred and General Motors came to be and then an excerpt about the characters incredible legacy is coming and those legacies are timely year than ever today. To set the stage for questions. First, why i wrote the book. By the way, when i started doing the research three years ago, i had no idea how timely it would be, but i also had a full head of dark hair and my wife can also attest to. What really intrigued me at first is the dearth of knowledge and information about the men at the center of the story, the portraits on the cover. Billy durant and alfred sloan. Billy durant was the founder of General Motors and created singlehanded against all and in defiance of the community especially the house of morgan. The and unlikely character you can not dream up in hollywood. The son of an alcoholic father, raised by a single mother when single mothers were shunned and a High School Dropout. By that time he was 21, he was the highest volume cigar salesman in the state of michigan. Before he was 40 come he was the worlds biggest manufacturer and seller of the horsedrawn wagons and carriages. Never content to rest on his morals always looking for the next new thing he took over the management of the struggling car company alled buick motors in the year 1904. Durant had absolutely no background in automobiles and knew nothing about how they worked and how to build them in volume. But within three years, buick was the number one selling car in america. From there, he went on to create General Motors only to lose control of its not once but twice. And when alfred sloan and terse the picture the drama intensifies. Billy actually hired alfred a. 1916 when he bought a Company Called roller bearing that he had taken charge of 15 years earlier. He hired alfred because he knew a good manager when he saw one and he also happened to know sloan was afraid his largest customer named henry ford was about to take the business in house and leave sloan high and dry with the production capacity. That was arguably the most hiring decision of the 20th century. But the end of approaching from the sidelines as sloan transformed it into Americas Industrial icon. Sloan was durants opposite in all respects, masai say the to precise. They were like oil and water. They were at odds over how they were managing all of the companies he brought in to General Motors. His frenetic style and failure to establish the Central Control drove him absolutely at the wall. In fact, slow and actually prepared his resignation for general motives and accepted the job offer when push came to shove in the showdown in 1920, billy was out the door and up the street while alfred tore up his resignation and soon took the command. That is just a twominute synopsis of the story. In the history of business or for that reason the human species. A few years ago they made a movie about Howard Hughes, the aviator built on his obsessive compulsive tendencies. Compared to billy durant, howard was love middle class and ebenezer scrooge was a wild man compared to alfred sloan and yet the story has remained unknown outside of a small circle of karnack and historians while the name henry ford is almost been canonized in popular legend. By the way, billy actually came close to buying the Ford Motor Company on two different occasions only to have a by henry himself the last minute. Its all the kind of material no screenwriter could invent but the story has never been told in a single narrative. The original General Motors building here in detroit is one of the state leased buildings ive ever been in. In fact it was the Largest Office building in the world and its designated as the National Historic landmark. As with many landmarks theres also a legend behind that building. General motors the longer occupies the site, but if you go there today and bring a pair of binoculars you can still see the letter d carved into the corners of each corner above the 15th floor. The building was originally going to be named the durant building in honor of the companys founder. They had already cut the letter d into the corners when he was thrown out of the company he created. When the building was finished was called the General Motors building, but nobody got around to removing it. The legend of course is that the letter d was billys way of getting back to the Management Team that threw him out, all of whom had been brought into General Motors. The point of the story is even though they lot of people here in detroit know about the letter d, i always found that not many people seem to know or care about how and why billy disappeared from the scene. In fact theres virtually no material on durant in the company archives. Its as if he had come and gone without really having done much to read when you would ask people what out durant you usually hear that he was a wheeler and dealer, gambler and oor manager but not much more. Even more surprising, when you ask about alfred sloan command succeeded speed and turned the company around, it wasnt that different. A lot of people could recite his famous Business Strategy is to centralize operations and coordinated control bill would change the game for all competitors but again if you look in the archives you could find hardly anything about sloan the man. He legend and of course it was just the way that he wanted. What i found when i started researching what in the up being this book mainly in durants personal papers and dozens of out of print manuscript in the books written in the 1920s. There were further than the wheeler and dealer and he was less than the gene yes. The more obvious it was that you could never tell the story of billy and alfred without telling the story of their peers all of whom as it turned out or just as strong willed and fascinating in their own ways as durant and slow in and their destiny tied to the interactions that they had with billy and alfred. The men like david to make that invented the process for bonding porcelain to metal that made the plumbing fixtures possible and then went on to create a buick motor to lose control of it within a year billy within the dying in the board of the traits harper hospital. Then like henry the master of the Precision Manufacturing who took over a company that had been started by henry ford, renamed it cadillac and then sold to General Motors only to have a falling out and then started getting another Company Called lamken only to watch it go bankrupt by his original nemesis henry ford. The list of characters kept growing and its even more complex in the social change that shaped each man not to mention General Motors. The further i got from ne fred to tie it all together in a single compelling narrative. As i mentioned before, i started digging and i had a lot more hair and with a lot darker. I found dozens of books and articles about all the characters written by the people that were there but in the 1920s and 30s, and guess what, they were all as dirt, none of them captured the character and the passion of these amazing men. So the challenge of the conundrum is how to bring it together and to do justice for them all. And then, i picked up an excellent book or a helen brandts sea biscuit about the legendary racehorse. You might not think of a connection between sea biscuit and General Motors, and i didnt either until a further until i read the first chapter, which talked about Charles Howard on the west coast in the 1930s. The story of how General Motors founder nd successor to get from obscurities to the Worlds Largest enterprise was much like the story of sea biscuit the unlikely horses. Sea biscuit rose from nowhere to capture americas imagination in the race against the war might get a marble, the disputed champion of the day. But General Motors did the same thing against ford motor. General motors was sea biscuit, durant and sloan with the oil and water trainer. Ford motor was more admiral and henry ford was even more unpredictable owner and trainer. By the way, the race between General Motors and ford motor did indeed capture the imagination in the 20s. There were stories every week in every newspaper across the country about how sloan and four were going neckandneck and they were profiled in the New York Daily News the way fox is profiled in todays sports tabloids. So with that string of the horse race the took command and started molding itself into what became the book. And what i found is that uniquely american story. Victory and defeat, stumbles nd comebacks, and tragedies. Today the story of the way they ut General Motors together and made it grow as timely as it is dramatic that he and the entire u. S. Auto industry in the midst of an unprecedented restructuring or still dealing with the consequences of what these two giants want for the Auto Industry in america. That is a short version of how i came to write the book. Id like to read one passage from the end of story, the human side of the story about what happened to billy after he was forced out of General Motors the last time in 1920. Although its sad and even tragic keep in mind a billy himself remained the Eternal Optimist through it all. Always looking for that next deal, always confident he would put off. The story is quite the opposite of course an insurer we will get into that in more detail in the question and answer session. While alfred sloan jr. Transform gen General Motors and the icon of efficiency and success, his new dreams ended hollow. In september 1938 he stood up the door of the estate on the jersey shore who were carried away still pursuing their dreams and schemes that were from mining to toothpaste, razor stand beer he borrowed 30,000 from the then wealthiest man in michigan thanks to his original partnership with billy durant, and 20,000 from alfred sloan cony there was ever repaid. In january, 1940, sloan finally reestablished the personal contact inviting him to attend the deep fritz celebration of General Motors 25 million vehicles rolling off the Assembly Line. Billy sat at the able, and sloan led him by the hand to introduce him to the executive sand and dealers. A was billys last appearance at the institution that he had created singlehandedly and against all odds. When the portions of the men more adventures of the white collar man were excerpted in the saturday evening post he wrote alfred a letter thanking him for what he called the handsome complements in the article. Fittingly, the letter also included a reminder that there was more to success than the science of management. This was billy the High School Dropout fighting to alfred sloan right into the phi beta kappa. I do wish that you had known me when we were laying the foundation in speed and action seemed necessary. Youre absolutely right in your statement that General Motors justified a different the fed of channelling after the units were enlisted and you with your training and experience some of it yourself with reliable sound judgment and a vision and devotion to the cause which is enabled you to build the General Motors of today is truly great institution. But to sum up the early history of General Motors reminds me of the following story from the civil war. The general wheeler who came up from the ranks led major bloomfield at the battlefield of chattanooga. And speaking at the engagement, the general said right up on that hill is where the company of nfantry captured the calvary general unit couldnt be. The nfantry cannot capture the calgary to which the general replied but, you see, this infantry captain did not have the disadvantage of the west point education, and he didnt know he couldnt do it, so he just went ahead and did it any way. That was billy durant. Sloan had a letter typed on General Motors stationery that focused on his own reasons for writing his book and made no direct reference to anything in durants letter. That exchange of letters was the last known direct contact between the former colleagues. While catherine remand lovingly at her husbands side through all the triumphs and tragedies, they had no children of their own. After the crash of 1929 they had less contact with his daughter marjorie and their son from billys first marriage. Cliff who gained fame as a california playboy and race driver with no steady job died of a heart attack in 193710 years before his father. Ironically, his first exwife led to the legendary after divorcing cliff quietly began ending them money to help with their living expenses. The money came from a trust fund that billy set up for her as a wedding gift when she married. He daughter marjorie whod gone through three divorces and struggled to maintain the image and lifestyle of the debutante drifted into drugs after her athers fall from wall street. Just five months after his death in march of 1947, marjorie was for buying and selling illegal narcotics. The story was reported in the New York Daily News on September September 16th, 1947. For 39 years to the day after million greeted General Motors. Mercifully her story to read it from the press after that had lined along with her fathers legacy. Not until august, 1958 during General Motors 50th anniversary did believe received public recognition for the greatest and the most improbable of all gimbles and achievements the founding of what had become the Worlds Largest industrial enterprise. Rather than a plaque or statute billys marker is an inconspicuous 10foot square slab of granite big enough to use for a stage rising just to feed off of the ground in a park in flint michigan. The onetime protege and employees whod taken for the leadership alfred p. Sloan jr. Was retired and sitting on the General Motors board of directors of the time. Sloan didnt attend the ceremony or the immigration however. The marble slab was laid by flinched rather than General Motors durant memorial sits in the middle of the Cultural Center opposite of the entrance to the Alfred Sloan Museum also built by the city if went better than General Motors. Today despite the name, the Cultural Center is dominated by empty parking lots and the weeds surrounding them. There are two flagpoles the top of the platform but most days by flags flying. The polls are scratched with graffiti and the grass is packed with weeds. Most passersby do not seem to otice the platform itself. Theyre mainly schoolchildren on bus excursions redican curious pilgrims eager to soak in the culture. In the end, he plays of the way the American Dream itself please out in todays media culture. Perfectly sculpted for 15 minute