Executive
GM's Buick division was having great difficulties during the Depression (according to Curtice, production was at only 17% of 1926 levels). Curtice was put in charge, and quickly made a new organization for Buick, and marketed a new car. He also created a small network of dealers that would be exclusively Buick dealers. Curtice guided Buick through the war years and by the time he was elevated to a GM vice presidency, he had made Buick the fourth best selling car line.
During World War II, Buick produced aircraft engines with such efficiency that the Army considered making Curtice a General, but he declined. In 1946, GM President Charles Wilson offered him the position of executive vice president—to be Wilson's right hand man—but Curtice declined, stating that he wished to see Buicks rolling again off the assembly line before he left the division. In 1948, Wilson offered the position again to Curtice; this time he accepted.
Curtice had greater power as executive vice president than any prior holder of that position. He was in charge of all staff matters. In 1953, Wilson left after President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him Secretary of Defense. GM's board of directors appointed Curtice to take Wilson's place.
Read more about this topic: Harlow Curtice
Famous quotes containing the word executive:
“More than ten million women march to work every morning side by side with the men. Steadily the importance of women is gaining not only in the routine tasks of industry but in executive responsibility. I include also the woman who stays at home as the guardian of the welfare of the family. She is a partner in the job and wages. Women constitute a part of our industrial achievement.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)