I worked at GE for a bit when I was in college right at the end of Jack Welsh's tenure. The bizarre culture blew my mind and in a big way steered me away from p

I worked at GE for a bit when I was in college right at the end of Jack Welsh's tenure. The bizarre culture blew my mind and in a big way steered me away from pursuing a career at big businesses. It was at the height of the 6 sigma management craze. I had 8 managers between me and the CEO. All of them were pitted against each other in a race to climb the corporate ladder. Internal competition wasn't the fundamental problem. It was how it created a culture of backstabbing in order to hit KPI targets. Managers would intentionally withhold important information from each other or hold back projects just to make their own quarterly reports look good. The general idea was you did a 2 year run at GE, climb as quickly as possible, then leave to pursue a consultant career teaching other companies the GE system of management. The culture was driven from the top down by Jack. It looked good on paper but was eating away at the company's longevity. The pinnacle example of the corrosive culture was when a female manager sent one of my female coworkers home because she wasn't wearing pantyhose. She pulled her into her office to explain how GE is a "dog-eat-dog" world, and women in particular need to act and dress a certain way to get ahead. And she wasn't wrong. Everyone was hyper focused on conforming to "the culture" driven ultimately by the quarterly reports, at the expense of all else. It was surreal with many parallels to a personality cult with Jack at the top. Strangely, I enjoyed working there and seeing how the sausage got made. But OMG, if GE didn't fail, I would have lost my faith in true meritocracy... not to mention a bit of humanity.