The "5. The Human Wreckage" section is probably the most interesting - on paper, everyone came out much worse (losers identified are workers, pension holders, shareholders, investors and executives which seems superficially comprehensive).<p>However it is important to recall that the people who actually made all the money extracting the wealth got out years before, retiring and/or selling stock. They're bystanders now and probably happy to run the whole operation again.<p>Although as an aside who these people are who think corporate pensions are a good idea is beyond me. People really should be in charge of their own savings in preference to their employer, expecting some random corporation to cover the cost was always a bit crazy even when it seemed sort-of possible that the system was stable. It is easy to have some sympathy but, as a practical matter, it was never going to work and it isn't a surprise that it didn't.
I worked for GE, back in the 1980s. It was the “Neutron Jack” era.<p>The subunit I worked for, was almost supernaturally dysfunctional.<p>I was there for 18 months, and they had 3 reorgs, in that time.<p>Once, the VP of our division, called an “all-hands” meeting, to tell us that he was a lawyer that didn’t have a computer, didn’t like software (we were a software company), basically, didn’t like us, and that we’d better get on the stick, and make number go up.<p>Ah…fun times…
I read Jack Welch’s autobiography <i>Straight from the Gut</i>. He was quite proud of the stack ranking process he introduced (rate employees every year and fire the bottom 25%). I recently listened to an interview with TSMC founder Morris Chang (arguably a better CEO than Welch, at this point), who said he never agreed with the idea of doing layoffs based on performance appraisals. He pointed out that any such process was hopelessly subjective and so how, as an engineer, could he support it and keep his integrity intact.<p>Btw, there’s a great interview with the author of <i>Power Failure</i> on the Bloomberg <i>Masters in Business</i> podcast.
Something nobody is saying is that there genuinely are synergies in GE's businesses. Take MRI for an example (albeit one I know a lot about...):<p>-- the superconducting magnet shell requires the accurate creation of 'nested doll' cryogenic containers, built to withstand magnetostatic forces in a highly regulated environment with defined safety requirements under catastrophic failure modes. Solving the design problem is equivalent to solving a huge set of nasty, coupled PDEs subject to loads of material constraints. This is directly analogous to aspects of jet engine design.<p>-- inside the bore of the magnet (but not in the cryostat) goes a device called the gradient set, whose job is to generate \partial B_z/ \partial_{xyz} as a function of time (that, very much indirectly, the radiographer specifies). This is a water cooled, resistive set of magnet coils with a defined frequency response curve, linearity requirements, etc. The current into them is generated by a set of three huge amplifiers, which have to actually take a signal delivered on a timebase of microseconds and volts and amplify it with negligible delay and deliver kA into a large inductor centimetres away from a patient. This is a formidable (power) electronic engineering challenge with huge parallels to various aspects of electrical engineering – e.g. managing (preventing) dielectric breakdown, thermal management, inverse solutions to Maxwell's equations in a quasistatic region (people use streamfunctions to do this well), etc.<p>-- the RF side of the system has to transmit kV and receive microvolts within microseconds into a definitively challenging electrodynamic environment with constraints on harmonics. Everything has to keep to a hard realtime constraint. The ADC must have a huge dynamic range and the problem is conducted massively in parallel. This is directly analogous to problems in telecommunications or RF design, but harder -- intermittent pulsed not continuous wave, and a hard requirement to accurately measure analogue voltages. Designing the RF coil ("probe" in NMR speak or ≈"antenna") is a further horrible (full-wave) EM design problem that even GE often subcontract out to one of about five specialist firms worldwide.<p>It's not a priori obvious to me that lots of competing companies would be better at creating stuff that requires the interaction of disciplines like this. Rather, I view the split up of GE and all of the woes of the article as evidence of a business mismanaged by MBAs. The defined benefit pensions should have been protected by law and overseen by an independent regulator - like my defined benefit pension that sits above my employer and shares risk among many different universities.
The saddest thing to me about this - is the cut of pensions.<p>My parents view pensions as gold standard. That it cannot be messed with and clearly this article shows that it can. The promise for your years of service can't be paid out.<p>Now something you believed would allow you to not worry until your passing, perhaps leave a small something to your children, won't be. Instead, you're beginning to worry about how you'll make ends meet in a few years with all the rising prices.
Note that GE is one of the example companies in the Collins/Porras book "Built to Last".<p>I'd love to see an explanation of what went wrong from those guys.
I read that book last year. Very informative read. To my surprise Jack Welch felt lesser villain in book than I have considered him before. My takeaway was things one can get way with being 100 million dollar company in a growing economy is not possible with 100 billion dollar company in stagnating economy.<p>All that growth in GE credited to its executives was in large part due huge american spending power with massive and growing economy. So all these ways where GE fucked its workers, environment and so on worked because there were others who would balance out. How ever at some point it was no longer the case then gravity brought GE to its rightful place.
'Financial engineering' sounds an awful lot like 'lying to investors'. Without brutal honesty about the performance of your subdivisions you're never going to receive healthy pressure to correct your course.
Personally, I want capital markets that are dynamic enough that some fraction of $n00 billion businesses become $(n-k)00 billion businesses (check out the aggregate market cap today of GE’s progeny).<p>I’m not even sure there’s a counterfactual world where GE is a $m trillion business: The global economy has largely evolved beyond these massive, diverse conglomerates, and likely all to the good.<p>What does a “wow, GE really has been managed wonderfully since 1980” story even look like? I imagine they split up much earlier, each spinoff establishes their own brand, and there’s no “GE” to talk about.
Recently read The Man Who Broke Capitalism by David Gelles which is an excellent review of the Welch years, how he worked, and how he sent his minions out across the corporate world to wreak havoc. Wonderful read and really provides perspective on why modern corporate America is what it is.<p>Light Out by Gryta and Mann follow up by focusing on the Immelt years and how he tried to keep the ball rolling despite the hole that Jack left him in. Also an excellent read.<p>Sounds like Power Failure covers a lot of the same material as these two earlier books perhaps with some historical material.
I recall driving by the GE facility in Syracuse, right next to the Thruway. Over time, the number of cars in the parking lot dwindled to basically none. Now it's a Lockheed-Martin facility for military radar (or at least was).<p>I imagine those GE workers who were young enough probably moved elsewhere, but the older ones didn't fare so well.
I think most of us can agree that Jack Welch's tenure was one of the worst things ever to happen at GE, and his odious management ideology was one of the worst things to happen to Corporate America. He was a glorified used car salesman.
Recently read "Lights Out", which was a fun book covering the past couple decades in good amount of details. Basically a hit piece on one of the CEOs, but hey if you're flying around with a "backup" private jet you probably deserve a couple hit pieces.
I haven’t read this book but I read another excellent book about the fall of GE. The book’s name was Lights Out.<p>Here is a positive review of that other book from Bill Gates:<p><a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/lights-out" rel="nofollow">https://www.gatesnotes.com/lights-out</a>
"Jeff has the unfortunate task of following a legend. It's like being a baseball player and following Babe Ruth." - Jack Welch, 2001<p>God that’s insufferable, even by Jack Welch’s standards.
I am reminded of my time at Xerox: Financialisation, making numbers, frequent reorgs, looking down on software...<p>But the biggest was coming up with nice new technologies, selling to customers; then not that many years later dropping support and leaving customers without a path forward.
Interesting.<p>This thread seems to be more about whether or not AI wrote the article, than the article's contents.<p>Easier to make yourself into a witch-smeller than a bonifide expert in what the witches are talking about, I guess.
The CEO demigod worship is woven into the fabric of the company and is still smoldering brightly with middle management. They all think they are Neutron Jack.
There was a link on HN claiming that business books are just entertainment and that you don't learn anything about business. And then listed some self help books.<p>THIS is a book about business.
I read this book. Going into it, in my head, I thought flannery always got the shorter end of the stick and was unsure if welsh or immelt did the company bad.<p>After reading it, Welsh was great (his creation of GE credit, while merely just a shadow bank, was a bit innovative, not to the point of lionized but certainly worth a merit, but his day-to-day running and operation and cost cutting / discipline, outside of a couple deal heat moments seemed really quite good).<p>...except for hiring Immelt, Immelt was a ridiculous disaster of a CEO that my god should've been fired nearly immediately, and Flannery got completely shafted, someone threw him out, grabbed his plan, and basked in the credit. Super tragic to see.
I don't think this article was written by AI - at least, I am not sure it is - but the way it is divided up, the bullet lists and "key quotes" and breaking a relatively short article into even shorter sections, makes it <i>feel</i> AI generated.<p>Sounds like an interesting book but the article says remarkably little.