For many years during the twentieth century, General Motors (GM) was the world’s largest industrial corporation by various measures, including number of employees and sales. Each year between 1933–2007, it sold more vehicles than any other manufacturer in the world. Despite its near collapse a few years ago, GM still lives on and maintains a substantial presence in the global automotive industry. In fact, by 2011, it had regained its place as the number one seller of vehicles.

The mighty GM of decades past left a distinctive imprint on the modern corporation. It offered a model of organizational structure that many other corporations followed in the middle part of the twentieth century. Organizational theorists have assiduously studied GM and its corporate leaders, and generations of business school students have analyzed GM’s early corporate structure. Like any huge organization, GM has constantly worked to balance decentralization and centralization, to craft the right model of federated governance. During its formative decades, it was led by innovators who devised and carried out reorganizations while maintaining a highly productive balance between decentralized autonomy and centralized control of strategy. As with our other cases, the balance at GM between subunit autonomy and central authority was never static, and it was not the result of broad consensus among leaders. Rather, GM’s institutional structure and the resulting settlements on authority were contested and repeatedly forged through political conflict within the leadership.