"What's good for General Motors is good for America, and vice versa." You know the line; GM chairman Charles Wilson said it in a Senate hearing in 1955. It comes off as arrogant and myopic, especially in retrospect, and yet it had plenty of truth to it. Vast and vertically integrated GM, with nearly half the US auto market, really did represent a good chunk of the US economy, and as much as any company it showed the power of business to touch lives. Think of the owner of the local Chevvy dealership who was also president of the Rotary Club; the General Motors Institute, in which many managers enrolled right out of high school; and even of popular culture (where would Berry Gordy have started Motown if Alfred Sloan hadn't figured out how to locate so much GDP in Detroit?).

These Escalade-size thoughts are triggered by the latest chapters in the GM saga, the offer of big buyout packages to employees at both GM and its spun-off (make that semi-spun-off) parts unit, bankrupt Delphi, quckly followed last week by sale of a stake in GMAC.

Is there an air of desperation about all this transacting and restructuring? Sure. But here's a scap of perspective, along with a reflection on how important the work that dealmakers do really is. The GM that seemed so inevitable and so permanent when Engine Charlie said what he said was, of course, neither; it was the result of multiple deals and a radical restructuring in the 1920s. To this day, the New York-based GM Treasurer's office, launched by Sloan himself, is at the center of all these kinds of activities at GM. When I wrote about the TO for Corporate Dealmaker in 2003 I was struck to see firsthand how intertwined pension liabilities and healthcare and such had become with strategy, and when I later spoke to a corp dev guy at Delphi I was struck by the fact that one of his jobs was just keeping the union reps in the loop. I thought about Sloan and his guys eighty years earlier, struggling through their crisis. The result that time was the 20th Century American corporation. This time?— Kenneth Klee

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