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Jack Welch has died
- PaulHoule 7y agoPlease no black bar for Neutron Jack.
- drubio 7y agoduplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464246
- dayofthedaleks 7y agoMy impression is that he was no management genius but rather fortunate in the timing of moving his company into the FIRE sector. All of that goodwill evaporated in the 09 crisis. Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions? I guess he also deserves the credit/blame for the ubiquity of Six Sigma.
- danvoell 7y agoI think he wrote the book all our dads said we were supposed to read.
- PaulHoule 7y agoJack gave himself an endowed chair at the "Jack Welsh school of management", one more sign that people like that have no idea what legitimacy looks like since 2000 or so.
- dralley 7y ago> Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions? Inflicting "stack ranking" upon the world, for one. Not all contributions are positive.
- soapboxrocket 7y agoThis. And if you pull if forward, stack ranking did a lot of damage to both GE and Microsoft after Ballmer implemented it. The real failure of stack ranking is it never ends, so at some point you are firing good employees.
- smitty1110 7y agoNot just that, but good employees get tired of dealing with the stress and sabotage from coworkers trying to stay ahead of the layoffs. In my experience, it speeds up the burnout process.
- abraxas 7y agoAlso the list of "good" employees is not consistent year to year. Even if you don't fire people most will have better and worse years. Sometimes the swings can be dramatic when people find their groove or conversely when they face burnout or have personal problems. Stack ranking is stupid, heartless and unscientific. Just like the man who invented it.
- hylaride 7y agoIt in fact gets worse. During stack ranking's tenure at Microsoft, they would often pull the "best and brightest" in the entire company into teams to accomplish certain goals. The theoretical "best and brightest" were then stack-ranked against each other. Every manager had to pick the "worst" person to eventually get canned.
- technofiend 7y agoIn my humble opinion stack ranking was meant to create a clear process by which to measure people relative to their roles and each other. (I'm not defending the practice, just stating purpose.) Instead it created selective pressure that measured how well you could game the process to appear successful and push down the ranking of everyone else for yourself and your employees. During the stack ranking heyday there was a manager who spent his year compiling a list of mistakes by other teams. When it came to year end reviews anyone asking about the ranking of this manager's people ended up deflected with questions about their own team members. People learned to just leave this manager's rankings alone and work around him. He was wildly successful, getting promoted early and often before leaving the company to go start a recruiting firm which allegedly applies some sort of AI principles to picking good candidates.
- axaxs 7y agoThe first paragraph is basically how I'll always remember him. Stack ranking is a farce. He was incredibly fortunate, but insisted it was his ideas instead. It's the equivalent to a vice heavy person winning the lottery, then writing a book claiming that if you want to be rich, you need to smoke and drink daily, and the proof is that I'm rich.
- rhizome 7y agoThe post hoc fallacy rears its head everywhere, if you look closely enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc
- Ididntdothis 7y agoHe was supposed to have created this company that cranks out highly capable managers in all eternity but somehow it didn’t work out. I read his book and already got a bad feeling about him. And from his latest TV interviews I got the impression that he was just a selfish prick that had learned nothing and gained zero wisdom in old age. Obvious he was a very powerful and capable man but he used his powers only for his own gain and overall made a negative contribution.
- pcurve 7y agoNeutron Jack. We can all thank him for pioneering stack ranking and Vitality curve performance management that called for firing of bottom 10 percent each year. A Japanese head of company once said, "there's no point firing bottom 20 percent because given time, there will be new bottom 20 percent formed to take its place.
- melvinram 7y agoPardon my ignorance on the topic, but why would moving a business into new areas be considered lucky? I wouldn't consider Apple moving into phones as lucky. Would you?
- monocasa 7y agoIt's just not what he pushes as the primary reason for his success. They also were sitting on a ton of real estate (and invested capital from their pension fund), so the comparison with Apple isn't totally on point. Apple didn't get into the market because they already had a warehouse filled with phones.
- reaperducer 7y agoIf you saw Apple moving into phones and then moved your business into phones and your business did well, a person like Welch would call himself lucky.
- monocasa 7y agoI once described the worst member of senior leadership I've had to deal with at a company as having no tricks other than cosplaying as Jack Welch. Like he instituted stack ranking at a 50 engineer company because he was old money, and it never occurred to him to interact with "the help" enough to know the engineers under him. He's one of two people in the management chain I've met in my career that they working at a company (not even in my management chain, but there at all) is mutually exclusive with me working there.
- IOT_Apprentice 7y agoI think they pushed outsourcing hard under his reign. They were one of the companies responsible for destroying a lot of IT jobs in the US as a result. Not a good guy at all.
- devonkim 7y agoEvery other F100 was outsourcing IT like crazy in the mid-2000s because of that Harvard Business Review article that talked about outsourcing everything non-essential to your primary business. Meanwhile, Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) thought that was a stupid idea because every business was being transformed by its IT and that it's a revenue multiplier, not a cost center (something that every other decent person in the rank and file of IT has believed since... ever). The whole "digital transformation" boom that swept the F100 in the past 10 years is essentially back-tracking on all these divestures and off-shoring efforts.
- mo1ok 7y agoI recently got a subscription to the HBR and am surprised at how...misguided it is. It's shocking how this locus of low competency is destroying American business. Ditto on the outsourcing, too - left a job at a blue-chip American company because its culture had been internally rotted by outsourcing. (Of course, they were hilariously struggling to keep and retain the talent necessary to stay ahead of the tech curve, now institutionally recognizing they've made a massive mistake. Most good engineers had a tenure of 6 months.)
- masklinn 7y ago> Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions? The ideas of outsourcing your core businesses, of fire-selling everything you couldn't exploit (any business GE was not #1 or #2, regardless how profitable), and top to bottom accounting fraud.
- VLM 7y agoTechnically he's not dead, he's just been downsized to increase shareholder value.
- ethbro 7y agoPublic figures are still human, with families...
- crystaldev 7y agoI'll grant you the families part.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aswanson 7y agoYeah, I have a hard time dancing on a persons grave. Unless they've done something totally evil, they should be afforded some respect. That said, hearing about Limbaugh's condition tested my ability to live by that principle.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago> Unless they've done something totally evil Well, according to a comment upthread: > In upstate New York he held back for over a decade any effort to mitigate legacy PCB pollution from GE’s mostly closed factories there. He funded AstroTurf organizations and downplayed research showing connections between PCB pollution and health problems.
- aswanson 7y agoYeah. That qualifies as evil in my book.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mhh__ 7y ago
- kingkawn 7y agoIn upstate New York he held back for over a decade any effort to mitigate legacy PCB pollution from GE’s mostly closed factories there. He funded AstroTurf organizations and downplayed research showing connections between PCB pollution and health problems.
- reflectiv 7y agohe sounds like a really standup kinda guy
- rc_mob 7y agoAh. So he is the reason I have three legs. I see.
- dobleboble 7y agoFor claims like that it helps to link to a source for the data. Making inflammatory statements without backing evidence makes for poor discourse IMO. I found this article that seems to cover the topic: https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Dredging-up-the-truth-5294643.php https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Dredging-up-the-tru...
- kingkawn 7y agowhat I said is verifiable with a cursory web search, as you have shown. I know people with cancer linked to this pollution. Your standard of truth makes no room for any reporting of personal experience and is invalid.
- prostheticvamp 7y agoThis is the Internet, and you are anonymous. Your “personal experience” has precisely zero credibility for asserting the existence of facts.
- kingkawn 7y agounless you make even the slightest effort to look it up and see that yes, Welch did exactly what I said. Which has already been done above. fighting with me over the abstract rules of internet engagement, rather than acknowledging that what I said is verifiably true from professional news outlets and that your complaints are over form alone.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deepaksurti 7y agoFrom wikipedia [1]: >> He stated that global warming is "the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring", and that it is a form of "mass neurosis". Yet, he said that every business must embrace green products and green ways of doing business, "whether you believe in global warming or not...because the world wants these products". From [2]: >> A vitality curve is a performance management practice that calls for individuals to be ranked or rated against their coworkers ... Pioneered by GE's Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has long been a controversial practice due to its negative effects on employee morale and potential for bias and discrimination. Many companies have abandoned the system in recent years All said and done, RIP. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Personal_opinions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Personal_opinions [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve edit: added [2] link
- mytailorisrich 7y agoI have never liked or understood the popularity (at least for a time) of the 'vitality curve'. Indeed, if you think that 10% of your employees must be fired every year then, to me, it is a sign that something is horribly wrong and you should really focus on that, not to mention the horrible effect this practice has on company culture and atmosphere.
- bena 7y agoI think the core idea makes sense, at least intuitively. Remove the worst performers. Make room for better people. The issue is that you will always have "worst performers". There needs to be a minimally acceptable performance level. And you also need enough slack so that the churn isn't affecting overall performance.
- mytailorisrich 7y agoRemoving the worst performers is the issue, as you somewhat suggest. You don't want to remove the worst performers. You want to remove those don't do their jobs or don't fit in the company. This is very different.
- williamDafoe 7y agoHe will be remembered as one of the greatest banksters of all time. He converted Thomas Edison's company of genius inventors into a factory of paper-pushing lending trolls.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoBasically a very successful management crank. The tragedy wasn't Jack Welch, the tragedy was a financial and economic system that actively rewarded his bizarre beliefs and actions.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- brandonmenc 7y agoMy father worked his way up from the foundry to "Business Leader" (management) at GE, starting in the mid 1970s. GE was a mess internally, all the way down to the shop floor, before Welch took over. His impact cannot be understated. We were big Jack Welch fans - if he hadn't grown GE the way he did, my hometown - where it was the largest employer for decades - would have been a lot poorer.
- danmaz74 7y agoWould you mind expanding what you think he did right? I'm curious to have a counterpoint to the other top comments, which are pretty negative.
- DavidAdams 7y agoIf you're trying to turn around a mis-managed company, a few rounds of identifying and eliminating people in the manager ranks that aren't pulling their weight could have a huge positive impact. So I could see that "neutron" Jack's stack ranking could have been great, had it been limited. But when you're consumed with your own genius, you tend to think that the thing that seemed to work, and everyone praised you for yesterday will keep working tomorrow.
- michaelt 7y agoIn some fields, acclaimed works seem cliched and obvious from where we are today, because the innovations that brought their acclaim have been so universally adopted. I'm not a historian of management theory so I don't know if the ideas are original, or even of how well Welch followed his own advice, but plenty of the things in his books are straight-talking common sense: * You should know your business well enough you don't need management consultants to tell you what to do * HR and hiring are important and should be represented in your senior team accordingly * If you want candour (which you do) you need to reward and praise it, not punish it * When there's a crisis, don't deny there's a problem He's not the first person to come up with every idea in his books, but even 40 years later there are companies that need to learn these things.
- brandonmenc 7y ago
- dredmorbius 7y ago"'Neutron' Jack Welch, who led GE's rapid expansion, dies at 84" (Reuters) ...Welch - known as “Neutron Jack” for cutting thousands of jobs - bought and sold scores of businesses, expanding the industrial giant into financial services and consulting. Under him, GE’s market value grew from $12 billion to $410 billion, making Welch one of the most iconic chief executives of his era. But his push to build out the GE Capital financing business nearly proved the undoing of the entire enterprise during the global financial crisis more than a decade ago, and GE now trades at a fraction of its peak value.... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-jackwelch/neutron-jack-welch-who-led-ges-rapid-expansion-dies-at-84-idUSKBN20P20T https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-jackwelch/neutron-...
- KKKKkkkk1 7y agoThe article has a good summary of his legacy and his gracefulness: Under Mr. Welch, GE became known for consistent profit performance and a surging stock price. Much of those gains came from GE Capital, the finance arm that ballooned under Mr. Welch and would almost destroy the company during the 2008 financial crisis. GE’s profit has plunged in recent years, dragged down by hidden costs in the company’s Capital unit and losses in the core Power business. The troubles have prompted the company to break itself apart, overhaul its leadership and slash its once-generous dividend. GE’s share price tumbled roughly 75% in 2017 and 2018, erasing $200 billion of wealth for millions of investors. In his later years, Mr. Welch witnessed the GE he built get dismantled. The decline of the company pained him, according to friends, and he sometimes said he gave himself an A for his execution of its operations, and an F for his choice of successor.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago“he gave himself an A for his execution of its operations, and an F for his choice of successor.” That alone disqualifies him as a leader “I did everything right but others screwed it up”.
- tyre 7y agoWhat story does the evidence tell you? If you're going to disqualify someone as a leader, Jack Welch is not that guy.
- unlinked_dll 7y agoIt tells me that he built a house of cards and left before the wind knocked it over
- buran77 7y agoHe's the type of leader who grew the company on a minefield of figurative debt and real hidden costs. Leaving behind something with a solid foundation makes you a good leader. Getting out in time from a Ponzi scheme you built doesn't. Another trait of a real leader is to be able to grow another leader who can do the same. By his own statements he failed.
- chirau 7y agoPlenty of heartless comments in this thread. It's a shame really. Rest In Peace, Jack.
- QuesnayJr 7y agoI don't have a strong opinion on Welch, but a) he fired lots of people from GE, and b) introduced stack ranking to the world, which got lots more people fired. Whether or not he was good for GE, he was a heartless man. Of course he gets a heartless response.
- calebm 7y agoIt may be expected, but just remember that we all have power to break negative cycles.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y agoYeah bullshit. Look at the reception Fidel Castro got: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041886 Anyone conservative you people dance on their grave. Anyone socialist, including brutal dictators, you praise them. It's as simple as that. I can find you many examples of this. Common theme between them all is their political ideology.
- QuesnayJr 7y ago"I don't want to be fired for a stupid reason" is a political ideology? Firing people for stupid reasons is a core conservative value?
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y agoIt's debatable whether they were stupid reasons, that's your opinion. But yes, it's called Right to work. > A Right To Work law guarantees that no person can be compelled, as a condition of employment, to join or not to join, nor to pay dues to a labor union. This results in less powers to unions, which means employers have more freedom of discretion to fire employers, but also means employees are not forced into massive corrupt labor unions that halt efficiency. Right to work states are mostly red states.
- alehul 7y agoGiven that every single comment I've seen so far is a joke or a negative, it's worth offering a more respectful perspective of his accomplishments and story from Wikipedia [1]: Jack Welch was the child of a railroad conductor, born and raised outside Boston. He worked as a golf caddie, newspaper delivery boy, shoe salesman, and drill press operator, throughout middle school and high school. Welch joined GE in 1960 as a junior engineer after his PhD in Chemical Engineering. He was frustrated with the bureaucracy, and planned on leaving, but decided to stay after an executive insisted he'd work on creating a small-company atmosphere. In 1981 at the age of 45, he became the youngest-ever chairman & CEO of General Electric. He dismantled many layers of management, finally fulfilling his wish that nearly led to him leaving GE to begin with. In his 20 years as CEO, he grew the company from $12 billion to $410 billion in market cap. Fortune magazine named him "Manager of the Century." He fiercely believed in free markets. Even despite the comments in this thread on his anti-Climate Change perspective, he believed that "every business must embrace green products and green ways of doing business", as that's what the people, and thus the markets, wanted. Another interesting note: "Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch
- hugi 7y agoThey always make you sound nice in the obituary.
- losthobbies 7y ago"Sure, there are only saints in the graveyard"
- tgv 7y agoWhat a nice, capable man he was: THE death of Stalin, like the death of Lenin 29 years ago, marks an epoch in Russian history. Rarely have two successive rulers of a great country responded so absolutely to its changing needs and piloted it so successfully through periods of crisis. Lenin was at the helm through five years of revolution, civil war, and precarious recovery. Stalin, coming to power in the aftermath of revolution, took up the task of organizing and disciplining the revolutionary state, and putting into execution the revolutionary programmes of planned industry and collectivized agriculture. He thus equipped the country to meet the gravest external peril which had threatened it since Napoleon, and brought it triumphantly through a four years’ ordeal of invasion and devastation. That's from the Times obituary.
- quaquaqua1 7y agoJack Welch is indirectly the reason I got fired at Oracle, because some group of bean counters thought it is smart to fire people regularly based on some subjective measurement. However I am very sad he died because I subsequently got a raise and met my wife at my next company.
- briandear 7y agoThere is something to be said about your comment: this illustrates the value of free markets and the efficient allocation of resources; you were allocated more efficiently and you made more money and got your wife.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- purplezooey 7y agoReally? My sense is that he is sardonically looking back at a shitty situation, not of his own making, that happened to work out for the better, and despite this would not wish it upon anyone, rather than endorsing it as being part of some larger 1980s laissez-faire bullshit ideology.
- Ghjklov 7y agoPurely luck though he could’ve also alternatively remained jobless with a bout of depression and became homeless after spiraling into ruin.
- magduf 7y agoI wouldn't call it luck; it really depends on a lot of factors. If he's a software dev like most people here, then he's in an industry where there's a high demand for his talents, so it's generally not that hard to find a new job. Unfortunately, this is of course not the case for all workers; laid-off coal miners for instance will have a much harder time.
- 7y ago
- optimiz3 7y agoSteve Ballmer revered Jack Welch's rank-and-yank management style. During the 2000s and early 2010s Microsoft's stack-rank reviews were infamous for the internal politics created. Didn't matter if you had a full team of top-tier engineers, the bottom 15% WAS going to get managed out. Savvy managers would hire low-tier performers to protect the productive ones. That's the only lens through which I have to view Mr. Welch's contributions unfortunately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://money.cnn.com/2013/11/13/technology/enterprise/microsoft-stack-ranking/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2013/11/13/technology/enterprise/micro...
- Ididntdothis 7y agoBallmer actually left a better company than Welch.
- throwaway55554 7y agoBecause of policies like this or in spite of them?
- hylaride 7y agoBoth. I've posted this before about Ballmer, but I'll repost: He consistently increased earnings via Windows and Office during his tenure as CEO. He was a very good businessman. He was not, however, a product guy. Witness their failures with the Zune, mobile, search, and early cloud computing. His problem was that he always tried to do what would be best for Microsoft first and not the customer. You can get away with this if you already have an entrenched install base (windows/office), but with net new products people will look at what's best for them first. Even with developers developers developers he tried too hard to get people to use pure MS tech and made developing for the web on MS ugly if you are using anything other than .NET. He didn't see the geeks learning to program in their basement or dorm rooms who ended up using free software instead of going through any "free" channels that may have been available to them (were they?). The result is a generation of developers on Macs and to a lesser extent linux. MS is only now catering to them. Funny enough, thinking of the customer is what MS did with the xbox and it worked out well enough.
- abraxas 7y agoThis is the guy we have to thank for for introducing stack ranking and other predatory employment practices. In my culture we're taught to never speak badly of the deceased so I'll say nothing about Jack Welch.
- markus_zhang 7y agoI read about Welch back in the days when some of my management friends admired his magic to bring GE to the status before he left. I'm also reading some books and articles about the root of modern US corporate management, which went back to the second World War and the 10 Whiz Kids. Very fascinating reads. However after the '08 financial crisis a lot of people took a different, more critique view and I think we have a lot to learn from those guys, positive and negative.
- DaniFong 7y agoI think his contributions are valuable but his ideas have been over-implemented -- it's time the swing the pendulum swings back.
- jorblumesea 7y agohttps://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1234474399694237696 https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/123447439969423769...
- Pxtl 7y agoHere's a reprint of an old WSJ article from the "Neutron Jack" era: > EVERYONE FIRED > Wall Street Reacts Favorably http://www.angelfire.com/hi3/ideology/fired.html http://www.angelfire.com/hi3/ideology/fired.html Michael Moore used it as the introduction to his '90s-era book "Downsize This!". Welch is quoted in the article: > Jack Welch, chairman of General Electric, had more concrete advice for the downsized workers. > "We've got 40 openings at our Tijuana facility right now," beamed a jubilant Welch. "I'd be more than happy to accept applications from any of our US workers who would like to relocate there. Just give our personnel department a call - and it will definitely help if you can speak Spanish!"
- Pxtl 7y agoI was posting because I remembered reading it decades ago and seemed factual, but after re-reading it in detail this article is obviously fictionalized and satirical, and isn't a literal WSJ article.
- josefdlange 7y agoSomeone call Jack Donaghy
- big_chungus 7y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22464246
- scottlocklin 7y ago>Under his leadership it became the largest company in America, switching from manufacturing toasters and television sets to fostering faster-growing businesses such as the NBC media business and the in-house financial arm, GE Capital. Yeah, levering up, firing people, deindustrialization and financialization about sums up the dude's career. "Business guru decides burning the furniture more efficient than heating with coal."
- watsocd 7y agoLike many leaders, Jack made a lot of good decisions but the lure of quick profits playing financial games has taken more than one long lived company down. I worked for Westinghouse starting in 1986. Westinghouse went through the same issues investing in real estate loans in the 90s and did not survive. I remember my manager telling me in the late 80s that the Financial Services division was making more money than the rest of the company combined. This did not make a lot of sense. It ended up taking the entire company down a few years later.
- russellbeattie 7y agoHN needs a obituaries section. Seriously. Until then, stop upvoting these constant "... has died" links! It's morbid and unenlightening. There is a large demographic that is reaching mortality age. HN is going to be filled with nothing but daily "has died" items for the next several years.
- dang 7y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20streaks&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- teslaberry 7y agowelch's shitty leadership is beside the point, he was doing what the group think of short term profiteering wall street wanted. h8 the player not the game. wall street and our political system is the problem, not a lone bullshit artist. also he was a handsome man, so cut him some damn slack. after all . he is dead. forever part of the ethos. what is there to really learn from one piece of art?
- reggieband 7y agoMy only memory of Jack Welch was a PBS interview I caught a slice of where he was asked what his number one piece of advice for management was. He said that a CEO's job was to create and promote culture. I can see a lot of negativity for the man in the comments here but I agree with him on the culture issue. I can understand the negative feeling people get with some of Welch's personal cultural choices. However, it does seem he was successful at articulating a culture and bringing in a team that believed in that culture. I think it is wise to try to learn from people even when you dislike them, maybe especially when you dislike them. Even if you don't like what he did, you can change your view to respect how he did it.
- hfdh434535 7y agoIt's not so much that we don't want to learn from someone we dislike. It's that we don't want to scour the haystack of awful traits to find a needle we can compliment.
- gumby 7y agoWelch was destructive for GE and the cult of his approach has been destructive for the industrial sector. He turned around GE for the short term, but undermined the fundamental model of a conglomerate (there are good arguments for and against conglomerates, but GE was an is one). The metrics used were ultimately all short term ones and allowed the business to become lopsided, a disaster from which it has still not recovered. The analogy of "cutting the fat" (nicely timed for the era of the Jane Fonda workout)* was stupid. Actual healthy humans have body fat in the teens, with a few elite athletes (who do nothing but train) at the very low end. Instead the mantra was to consider anything not immediately useful -- drive the "body fat" to 0%. It's like a community madness, and it spread to corporate America and to some extent governments as well which has resulted in the current parlous state of the economy: a Potemkin economy that looks great only because the metrics used all face the "painted side". Good riddance to this blood sucker. * no insult intended for the Jane Fonda Workout
- exclusiv 7y ago> Good riddance to this blood sucker. Really? You don't agree with his corporate style / strategy / books and that justifies saying something like that?
- gumby 7y agoI could not care less that he destroyed GE and became rich in the process. That's a GE shareholder problem. But I had hoped my message was about more than corporate "style". First: he's been fundamentally destructive to the global economy, which has had a particularly brutal effect on, IMHO, the majority of people who live in countries that were industrial economies in the 1980s. The hollowing out of the middle class and precarious economic position of younger GenXers and millennials can be laid in a large part at the unthinking adoption of the bullshit he promoted and demonstrated. (note that I am at the beginning of GenX and my child as younger than a millennial so I am not bitter from some personal hurt here). (BTW although GE outsourced during this period, so did many companies, and I do not lay that at his feet. And the result of outsourcing is much more of a mixed bag than it is often described, and in the balance is likely even positive, though the way it was implemented in the US was a combination of this "strip to the bone" which yes has been destructive.) Second: true, he's dead and that's a tragedy to his family and close friends which I don't downplay. But also he was an asset stripping parasite whose model has ultimately been destructive and he was a lauded champion of such behavior. His death is an opportunity for people to reflect on his immoral behavior the consequences of which we are still suffering from.
- jdkee 7y agoThis thread is relevant. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234474399694237696.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1234474399694237696.html
- hummel 7y agoJack Welch, head of GE Plastics that polluted Pittsfield MA and the Connecticut River, acceeded to the throne of once-solid General Electric. Through his gentle ministrations he turned the company into a graveyard, driving Schenectady, NY from a middle class heaven into a rust-encrusted hellhole. Jack's financial acumen provided for monotonically increasing stock prices through his tenure. He did this through financial manipulation that would have landed lesser mortals in jail for securities fraud. Upon the sale of the General Electric Reinsurance (GE Re) to Swiss Re, Jack's fraud was uncovered to the tune of $19.2BB. This, however, didn't affect St. Jack, who had moved on and left Jeff Immelt to hold the bag. In the financial crisis of 2008, GE Capital's "investments" into derivatives imploded and GE was within one day of failing to meet payroll and default on many obligations. Jack's good friend, Warren Buffet, however, came along with $5BB in cash and saved the company for a slight premium. Jack was known as a sharp negotiator and a master of project management and contracts. His marriage failed one month after his wife of many years became "vested" in the pre-nuptial agreement. Suzie Welch was unavailable for comment at the time of publication. Welch demanded full commitment and high levels of performance from his employees. He trained all in the religion of Six Sigma, all the better to remove "waste" and "unnecessary costs" from GE products. He also trained all managers in "ethics" as a means for them to know and understand the limits of ethical behaviour, to know where the gray zone was in relation to those limits, and then to be able to "cluelessly" operate beyond the gray zone limits. He is survived by countless GE customers who cheer the ongoing demise of the company, by arrogant former employees and managers who remain unemployed due to their catchphrase "this is how we did it at GE", and by many retirees doomed to eat catfood since their no-decision investment in GE stock has left them in penury.
- jcomis 7y agoI grew up in Schenectady (after the glory days of GE) and it's crazy how much GE destroyed the town. Still has yet to really recover. Oh, and now they put a casino in.
- dbg31415 7y agohttps://www.perdoo.com/resources/stack-ranking/ https://www.perdoo.com/resources/stack-ranking/ > Stack ranking is harmful because it creates an environment which encourages unproductive behavior. Instead of teamwork, it tacitly rewards backstabbing. The fear of losing one’s job makes people unlikely to speak their mind, leading to a closed environment, in which innovation suffers. Finally, it leads to the emergence of “brilliant jerks,” who don’t recognize or care that running a successful business is more than just hitting quarterly targets.
- mrfusion 7y agowhat exactly did he die of? It’s so amazing the super rich really don’t have access to any extra health care than regular middle class.
- magduf 7y agoExtra health care only goes so far; your genetics and lifestyle have much more to do with your ultimate lifespan. Great healthcare isn't going to make up for being lazy and eating crappy food. But some people seem to have genetics that let them abuse their bodies and still live to very old ages.