Post by Michael Gnaedinger

By 1955, General Motors was pulling in 9.8 billion dollars a year, roughly double the revenue of the next largest company on earth. The decision that built that gap came down to a designer named Harley Earl, hired to make you unhappy with the car you already owned, not a better engine. Every year, a new look, whether the car underneath had actually changed or not. Sloan called it dynamic obsolescence. Critics called it planned obsolescence, and the name stuck. It worked brilliantly for thirty years. Then Japanese manufacturers showed up selling the one thing GM had deliberately stopped competing on: durability. That part of the story is coming in a future piece. Article 6 of 13 in my decade by decade series on the biggest company in the world since 1900. Don't miss the next part in the series, coming tomorrow. An overview of the series can be found here: https://lnkd.in/gZ7z-iXk