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I wonder if anybody has any good book / article references on alternatives to what Jack Welch did with GE. For years what he did was touted as genius and effici

by xt00 4y ago

I wonder if anybody has any good book / article references on alternatives to what Jack Welch did with GE. For years what he did was touted as genius and efficient etc. But it seems that these strategies all sort of make sense if your goal is to maximize executive pay, dividends, and share price, while cutting jobs, R&D spending (to a certain extent outside of known profit centers like plastic manufacturing in the case of GE), and in general optimizing for financial engineering rather than hard engineering improvements. Basically I think plenty of people would say that he promoted a bunch of ideas that were successful for a while but now that we have some hindsight I wonder what would be some good alternative ideas to modernize GE in a better way.

kurupt213 4y ago
The key phrase was you can’t save your way to prosperity. As soon as your company switches focus to profitability (%) from profit (gross number) they are out of ideas
- nmhancoc 4y ago
  There’s an idea in some business circles about businesses where the savings _is_ the prosperity, “scaled shared prosperity” is usually the term thrown around. Examples are companies like Amazon, Costco, or Walmart where the business model revolves around deepening the value proposition for customers through amortizing costs among greater customer numbers or aggregate buying power. Insurance would be another example of this business model.
  - kurupt213 4y ago
    But I’m assuming they are still focused on growth
lt_kernelpanic 4y ago
Not quite what you're looking for, but this book is an intriguing description of the struggles of Jeff Immelt and later GE execs to keep up GE's success after Welch's departure. In particular, trying to manage GE Finance: https://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Delusion-General-Electric/dp/035856705X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=3N08EY9L252WO&keywords=lights+out+book&qid=1656992381&sprefix=lights+out%2Caps%2C395&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Delusion-General-Electric/...

by xt00 4y ago

kurupt213 4y ago

The key phrase was you can’t save your way to prosperity. As soon as your company switches focus to profitability (%) from profit (gross number) they are out of ideas

nmhancoc 4y ago
There’s an idea in some business circles about businesses where the savings _is_ the prosperity, “scaled shared prosperity” is usually the term thrown around. Examples are companies like Amazon, Costco, or Walmart where the business model revolves around deepening the value proposition for customers through amortizing costs among greater customer numbers or aggregate buying power. Insurance would be another example of this business model.
- kurupt213 4y ago
  But I’m assuming they are still focused on growth

lt_kernelpanic 4y ago

Not quite what you're looking for, but this book is an intriguing description of the struggles of Jeff Immelt and later GE execs to keep up GE's success after Welch's departure. In particular, trying to manage GE Finance: https://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Delusion-General-Electric/dp/035856705X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=3N08EY9L252WO&keywords=lights+out+book&qid=1656992381&sprefix=lights+out%2Caps%2C395&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Delusion-General-Electric/...