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Owing to Sloan’s reception for candidness, a young Cadillac engineer named Nicholas Dreystadt realized that he could ask for a hearing with the board. His topic: how to make Cadillac profitable in 18 months, and he requested 10 minutes of the board’s time. At Sloan’s GM, the young engineer received a short hearing to present his plan.
Dreystadt argued that Cadillac was the one GM car that was a symbol of status, the car men purchased when they had made it in the business world. But Dreystadt offered other, surprising news to the board: the Cadillac brand was the status symbol for wealthy black men. In practice, General Motors, like all other U.S. car companies, did not market to black people. There were no dealerships in the urban areas or towns where blacks lived. Black men could purchase Cadillacs only by asking white friends to act as surrogate buyers. Dreystadt recalled the incident of his initial pleading with the GM board, which he recounted years later to Peter Drucker:
One of the [board] members said, “Mr. Dreystadt, you realize, don’t you, sir, that if you fail there won’t be a job for you at GM?” “Of course, I do sir,” I [Dreystadt] said.
“But I don’t,” said Mr. Sloan quite sharply. “If you fail, Mr. Dreystadt, there isn’t going to a job for you at Cadillac. There won’t be Cadillac, but as long as there is a GM, and as long as I run it, there’ll always be a job for a man who takes responsibility, who takes initiative, who has courage and imagination. You worry about the future of Cadillac. Your future at GM is my worry.”9
Excerpted from of ‘My Experience with Bio Enzymes: The Earth Friendly Magical Cleaners Kindle by Shrekanth RG