Feedback: The Concept of the Corporation Chapter 2

Here is another spot where software is going to change the game. Drucker is now talking about the Sloan meetings, the large conventions that Alfred Sloan held for managers to discuss problems and policies. Why is there a large meeting facility in Milford, Michigan at the GM test facility? It’s a small town in the far eastern corner of Oakland County. But it has direct rail connection to Detroit and to the northern Detroit suburbs. It was a place for GM execs to get to the country and talk.

Drucker talks about the meets in glowing terms, but then he says nothing that Beninger doesn’t say 40 years late in his discussion of managerial feedback. Over 600 GM executives attended these meetings, which must have been most of the senior management.

Companies are bigger. They are less interested in assembling their top execs in one place. There are also more ways of getting and distributing information. I know that large corporate meetings still exist but heavily supplemented by teleconferences and other exchanges of information. IBM used to bring all of its sales staff to Endicott New York every summer. I doubt that that is still the case.