Alfred P Sloan (1875-1966) was responsible for the success of the American car manufacturer General Motors (GM), which grew to be the largest organisation the world had seen. Involved in the company for almost fifty years, Sloan's achievement was of a practical nature and manifested itself in the organisational structure of GM. His creation became a paradigm for big business, and its success has earned Sloan's management techniques a place in the textbooks. Micklethwaite and Wooldridge call him a founding father of management theory, and Rubython states that Sloan 'invented modern management'.