Time & Perspective Quote by Alfred P. Sloan

Sloan’s line has the chill efficiency of a man who ran an empire built on scale: heroism isn’t a moral category, it’s a statistical outcome. “51 percent” is doing a lot of work here. It punctures the comforting myth that leaders win by being visionary every day. In a complex organization, perfection is fantasy; the real edge is being slightly less wrong, slightly more consistent, slightly better at repeating what works than the next executive.

The subtext is managerial, almost Darwinian: success belongs to the operator who survives uncertainty, not the philosopher who dreams of certainty. It’s also a quiet defense of risk. If “hero” status only requires a bare majority of correct calls, then you’re permitted to miss often, as long as your hits matter and your misses don’t kill you. That’s the GM-era worldview in miniature: systems, diversification, controls, and the ability to absorb failure across a huge portfolio of products, departments, and decisions.

There’s an implied critique of how we hand out acclaim. We treat corporate leadership like genius, but Sloan suggests it’s closer to batting average plus public relations. Win more than you lose, keep the machine humming, and history will supply the cape. The line lands because it’s bluntly anti-romantic, a corrective to entrepreneurial mythology: the “hero” is frequently just the person who managed probabilities, incentives, and timing better than the people around them.