Product Description

The roller-coaster life of the flamboyant creator of General Motors

William C. Durant did big things the big way: he overreached, but, until his final failure, he picked up the pieces time after time to confound his competitors. From a turbulent childhood in the small town of Flint, Michigan, to his phenomenal success in creating General Motors, Durant's meteoric career easily rivals the success stories of modern legends like Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, and Bill Gates. With his trademark smile and personal charisma, Durant assembled General Motors in a few short years, buying companies at the rate of one every thirty days. Durant's deal-making artistry even tempted Henry Ford, and had Durant upped his acquisition price Ford would be a division of GM today.

Durant's story illuminates the conflict between innovation and control of innovation -of the uneasy alliances struck again and again between inventors and their sources of capital. His years of heady success building General Motors were marked by epic struggles with bankers. But he depended on only a few sources of big money to finance his exploding business, and pitted himself against forces he underestimated or refused to consider. Gambling on a run on GM stock, he was finally forced into a buyout that ousted him from his role in the GM empire.

Into the dramatic tale of this early twentieth-century mogul come the fascinating automotive pioneers -Henry Ford, David Buick, Charles Nash, Albert Champion, Louis Chevrolet, and Alfred P. Sloan. On Wall Street, J. P. Morgan turned down Durant's request for a loan while Pierre du Pont invested in Durant's expansion. Tracing the fortunes of a man and his era, The Deal Maker is a fast-paced, rousing tale of Durant's dizzying success and ultimate failure.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #507204 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12-28
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.08 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Amazon.com
Long before Ted Turner and Steve Case, a flamboyant dreamer named William Crapo Durant was assembling innovative corporate empires that would rival any. After growing a Flint, Michigan, carriagemaker into one of the biggest players in a booming industry, Durant got caught up in the automotive frenzy sweeping the world and in 1908 established General Motors by acquiring a stable of existing carmakers (including Buick, Cadillac, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac) as well as parts companies and manufacturing plants. In The Deal Maker, experienced biographer Axel Madsen goes behind the scenes to detail also the financial setbacks that soon cost Durant control of GM, the partnership with Louis Chevrolet that led to formation of the Chevrolet Motor Car Company, his triumphant reestablishment at the top of GM (and second embarrassing fall from power), the formation and failure of his alternative automaker, Durant Motor, and, finally, the enormous stock-market victories he enjoyed before his complete financial destruction in the 1929 crash. The Durant that Madsen reveals is a business visionary truly worth getting to know, the "Great Gatsby of carmaking" who understood the big picture but lacked the personal patience and managerial skills necessary for long-term success. --Howard Rothman

From Publishers Weekly
In the early 1900s, entrepreneurs by the hundreds were looking for ways to build the best horseless carriage that would lead to a pot of gold. What set Durant apart from other would-be car czars was that, long before others caught on, he understood that the business was headed toward consolidation, and that to survive he would need access to big money. Madsen, a veteran biographer of Hollywood types (Stanwyck; Billy Wilder; etc.), relies on a few interviews and a lot of secondary sources to present a rather cursory but well executed glimpse of one of the giants of the automobile industry. After he secured the necessary capitalization, General Motors was formed in 1908, and Durant went on a buying spree that saw him add some 25 companies to GM by 1910. But a recession drove the company's bankers to demote Durant to a vice-president, a move that in the end set the stage for Durant's most satisfying personal triumph. Working through a new company he formed, Chevrolet, as well as with allies, Durant was able to win control of GM from the bankers in an unexpected coup. But the growing complexity of the car market made Durant's style of one-man rule outdated. Even before his failure to adopt modern management techniques could break him, he lost everything in the crash of 1929. While it doesn't shed any new light on the history of the automotive industry, Madsen's workmanlike narrative tells a well-structured story of innovation, financial derring-do and hubris. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
William Durant became a millionaire by building horse-drawn carriages in Flint, Michigan, at the turn of the century. In 1904 he bought Buick, a fledgling automobile company, and this only whetted his appetite for more. Before the end of the decade, he had amassed 25 companies that he would turn into General Motors. Regularly overextending himself and speculating imprudently, Durant lost and regained control of GM several times. By the 1930s he was broke, and World War II saw him running a Flint bowling alley. In 1942 he had a stroke, and he was forced to live on handouts from the likes of Alfred Sloan and Walter Chrysler until he died in 1947. The cautionary story of Durant's life has already been told well by Lawrence Gustin in Billy Durant (1973) and Bernard Weisberger in The Dream Maker (1979). Although no new information has been uncovered, Madsen weighs in with his version, and libraries without one of the two earlier accounts should consider adding Madsen's David Rouse