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Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric

238 points by gwintrob 1y ago

actionfromafar 1y ago
”The company ran on quasi-religious faith that the right leader could bend markets and reality itself.” Hm, doesn’t ring a Bell.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago
  Did someone say "religious"? https://computer.rip/2020-06-14-manifest-telephone.html https://computer.rip/2020-06-14-manifest-telephone.html I said that religion does not thrive under capitalism, and of course this was the fate met by the Bell system. The breakup of the Bell system in 1982 occurred primarily in response to their very high rates, which were (accurately) seen as symptomatic of the monopoly they enjoyed. CNBC Reporting Live from Jack Welch's funeral, March 5, 2020: https://youtu.be/6opKFgvRzjE?si=ynbAEYEZBCzfuTqE https://youtu.be/6opKFgvRzjE?si=ynbAEYEZBCzfuTqE Nobody is wearing masks, but there is a lot of name-dropping by the field reporter, Robert Frank, and a full obituary in the dooblydoo; don't miss them
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Widespread mask mandates were still a few weeks away on March 5.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      Only if you mean """Mask mandates""" that had no enforcement. At one point here in southern Maine, we encouraged people to stay at home if you didn't need medical attention, but at no point were cops legally allowed to pull you over without standard probable cause, and you were committing no crimes by being out and about without masks. Companies who disallowed you inside without a mask were exercising their first amendment right to association to not associate with people who could cost them money by getting their workers sick. A renowned local pizza company spent that summer loudly crying about mask mandates and loudly not conforming to gentle asks to increase spacing and limit indoor dining. They were documented as the site of several significant outbreaks and now the company is dead. Because people stopped going. Because nobody cares so much about pizza that they want to catch something that is from an inconvenience all the way up to lethal.
ivraatiems 1y ago
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 feel AI generated. Sounds like an interesting book but the article says remarkably little.
- cogogo 1y ago
  Felt like a summary - not sure I even considered AI even if it didn’t read like a critical review. I do really want to read the book. Jack Welch is a case study in hubris. And I worked for a startup that had a relationship with Immelt. We kept trying to use breakfasts and dinners with him as a marketing ploy…
- gwintrob 1y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I try to keep track of quotes I like when I'm reading. This was an attempt to bundle them up into some useful themes. I'll try to expand into something more opinionated for the next one :)
  - cr125rider 1y ago
    I liked how it was laid out. I consume information like that well. Thanks for the write up.
  - Cogito 1y ago
    Just reiterating what cogogo stated in a sibling, but the thing that threw me was the 'review' in the title. I was expecting some critique or comparison but instead saw summary and highlights. I enjoyed the summary and highlights, and learnt about some details I would likely have never otherwise seen, so I think it's just the framing that seemed 'off'. Depending on your intent consider reframing or adding critique, but I think the content is good and I appreciate you making it. [edit] There is some critique and comparison in the opening: "Shakespearean tragedy" and "The result is equal parts invention history, boardroom knife-fight, and forensic accounting thriller." but I think these are the only ones. I would love to know why you think this, and what you like about your "favorite ideas" (and any things you didn't like!)
squeedles 1y ago
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. 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. Sounds like Power Failure covers a lot of the same material as these two earlier books perhaps with some historical material.
- tonyarkles 1y ago
  > 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. The parts about Boeing in that book are... rough. Not rough as in "poorly-written" but rough as in "holy hell is that ever a brutal way to ruin a good company". Excellent book but lol it's not a feel-good read :)
  - Barbing 1y ago
    Maybe a decade ago I read from critics concerned a shift to an aggressively globalized supply chain was certain to wreak havoc on Boeing’s quality control. e.g. safety-critical nuts and bolts used to be produced down the street, now you get a few nuts from say Thailand and a few bolts from Malaysia… the critics complained it was certain to lead to problems. Was that a part of what you read about in that book?
    - tonyarkles 1y ago
      Not significantly no, it was much more focused on the McDonnell-Douglas reverse acquisition. To summarize: McDonnell-Douglas was failing and bought Boeing with Boeing’s own stock (technically Boeing bought McDonnell-Douglas with Boeing stock but in practice McDonnell management assumed control). MD’s executives were Jack Welch protégés and did the same thing to Boeing that happened to GE.
roenxi 1y ago
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). 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. 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.
- rlkf 1y ago
  In Norway, the companies are required by law to pay the pensions into a special type of investment account where withdrawal are not allowed until you are retired, but you can choose your own investment profile: A mandatory 401k. The arrangement where the _company_ controls the account seems to me to be more of a allowed delay in salary payout, to the benefit of the company, than a retirement account for the employee.
  - varjag 1y ago
    The savings are managed by bank or insurance companies' subsidiaries who are entirely unrelated to the employer. In other words it has nothing to do with mid century corporate pensions.
  - lazide 1y ago
    The real fun situation is when the 401k requires mandatory investment in the company stock. None of the responsibility, all the moral hazard.
    - collinmcnulty 1y ago
      This was made illegal in the US after Enron.
zdw 1y ago
Note that GE is one of the example companies in the Collins/Porras book "Built to Last". I'd love to see an explanation of what went wrong from those guys.
- Hilift 1y ago
  Those were great books, but it doesn't age well when you fawn over Walgreens and a few years later the books have an aged like milk patina. I worked for GE for a couple of years. They are a conglomerate. They acquired other companies. I worked for a company where GE was the largest customer, and GE acquired it. If a company started to perform poorly, it wouldn't be long before it would either be sold or split apart. The company I was working at probably would have failed anyway due to rapid competition, but since GE used a lot of its products it was sort of a no brainer until an alternative was found. Acquiring and sunsetting companies is not uncommon now, but back then it wasn't received well and backlash accumulated over time. They had/have a huge part of the jet engine market. Due to their size and executive connections, they were capable of landing large contracts, such as defense and aerospace. They aren't successful if compared to Meta for example, that nets $70 billion per year. GE acquired the power grid component of Alstom, a French company in 2014. That company was previously fined by the US DOJ for $772 million for FCPA violations (bribes). (This was back in the US World Police days). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Judicial_investigations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Judicial_investigations
- marbro 1y ago
  [dead]
rtpg 1y ago
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.
delibes 1y ago
GE "created the jet engine"? British would disagree
- gwintrob 1y ago
  Learned something new! First US jet engine - https://www.ge.com/history-ge-aerospace https://www.ge.com/history-ge-aerospace. Thanks for pointing it out.
- UberFly 1y ago
  Context: "Sir Frank Whittle, an English engineer, is credited with inventing the jet engine. He patented the design for the turbojet engine in 1930, and his work led to the first operational jet engine in 1937. Independently, Hans von Ohain in Germany developed a similar jet engine, with the first flight powered by his design occurring in 1939. Both are recognized for their pioneering contributions, but Whittle's work laid the foundational concepts."
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    All modern jet engines are based on Ohain's axial flow design, not Whittle's radial flow one. Ohain's engine first ran in 1937. The Heinkel HE178 was the first flying jet airplane, with Ohain's engine. The Me262 was the first operational jet fighter, again with Ohain's engine.
    - jansan 1y ago
      > The Me262 was the first operational jet fighter, again with Ohain's engine. I think "Ohain's engine concept" would be more correct. Ohain worked at Heinkel and developed the HeS 011 engine. However, the Me 262 was equipped with the Junkers Jumo 004, which was based on Ohain's design, but developed without him. The first test flights were actually done in 1942 with two BMW Typ P 3302 turbines (later called BMW 003).
      - WalterBright 1y ago
        "Granted a patent for his turbojet engine in 1936, Ohain joined the Heinkel Company in Rostock, Germany. By 1937 he had built a factory-tested demonstration engine and, by 1939, a fully operational jet aircraft, the He 178. Soon after, Ohain directed the construction of the He S.3B, the first fully operational centrifugal-flow turbojet engine. This engine was installed in the He 178 airplane, which made the world's first jet-powered aircraft flight on August 27, 1939." https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/ww2/projects/jet-airplanes/planes.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/ww2/projects...
twoodfin 1y ago
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). 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. 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.
- gwintrob 1y ago
  There's an alternative world where they didn't focus so much on financing and GE Capital. You make a good point that they still would have a diverse set of businesses that would be hard/awkward to build in parallel.
- floatrock 1y ago
  Capital markets do these kinds of spin-offs regularly. Problem is usually these spin-offs happen because it becomes clear the parent org has been doing something nasty that's going to create tons of legal liability, and the spin-off is really protecting the parent from lawsuits. DuPont is in the news recently with how they did this with PFAS pollution. Sure, sue the "PFAS company" into oblivion, but thankfully the PFAS polluter is no longer DuPont or DuPont investors. Not DuPont's problem that Teflon pan sales can't make up for the costs of all the associated environmental cleanup. This happens frequently with pharma companies when internal testing shows there might be some long-term side-effects before it becomes clear in public studies. I think I remember hearing this playbook was used with asbestos back in the day.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  I think GE is a tragic story in that they painfully and successfully navigated the transition from legacy giant manufacturer to the global economy, but overdid it. Growing up in an area with a big presence (one of their division HQ), I did alot of early career business with them. They were shady everything was purchased with weird leasing agreements with themselves, etc. The business strategy was good, but the demands to return growth powered by financial engineering ultimately killed the company.
rkagerer 1y ago
"financialization and imperial CEOs destroyed a 130-year industrial icon"
fisherjeff 1y ago
"Jeff has the unfortunate task of following a legend. It's like being a baseball player and following Babe Ruth." - Jack Welch, 2001 God that’s insufferable, even by Jack Welch’s standards.
irjustin 1y ago
The saddest thing to me about this - is the cut of pensions. 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. 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.
- mgh95 1y ago
  Honestly, I think people are beginning to see pensions through the lens of the common adage "if something is too good to be true, it probably is". I just think it's a sign of the times where the population isn't expanding as rapidly and the promises made by pensions simply can't be kept.
  - hoseyor 1y ago
    It was always a fraud of future promises, an actual and literal con job. It is the inherent risk of trusting others, strangers nonetheless, with your own future, let alone “retirement”. It is another one of those core metrics, even if a lagging one, that should be used to evaluate whether government has failed; the delta between how secure someone would currently be if they had just invested all the pension/social security money that was stolen/defrauded from them. Most of our governments would be exposed as the failed governments they are.
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      Social Security was always a wealth transfer scheme, not an investment scheme.
    - mgh95 1y ago
      This goes directly to the question of the PBGC giving bailouts (https://www.pbgc.gov/arp-sfa https://www.pbgc.gov/arp-sfa) rather than windups and dissolution. These bailouts -- and the decisions if a pension fund should be forcibly closed -- are political in nature. For example, Biden bailing out the Teamsters pension fund (https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/11/01/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-1-2-million-pensions-protected-under-biden-harris-administration-celebrates-historic-support-for-unions/ https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...) or the decision by congress to ignore the fact that CalPERS has continuously below the 80% recommended funding for non-governmental pensions putting a 1.7T time bomb in play. In essence, government is failing to play one of its more essential roles of regulator.
azalemeth 1y ago
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...): -- 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. -- 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. -- 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. 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.
- fluidcruft 1y ago
KnuthIsGod 1y ago
Looks and reads like LLM dreck. Perhaps it is time to have rules about the submission of AI generated trash to HN as faux-articles.
- getnormality 1y ago
  I don't think it's entirely AI-generated. The review selects details and explains them logically, e.g. why GE was able to financialize itself. AI slop doesn't have logic, it just treats the text as a bag of words and vaguely gestures at the overall vibe. On the other hand, the Key Quotes are not really that key, and some of the bullet points don't really work (it's not clear how the LTC insurance time bomb can be considered an accounting trick).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- postexitus 1y ago
  That's my feeling as well. Nowadays it's getting harder to differentiate between LLM "dreck" and genuine bad writing that feels like personal notes of some uninitiated reader.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  What is the difference between AI generated and paid-per-word fiverrr writers? Because the bar is on the floor when it comes to writing sometimes.
JackYoustra 1y ago
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. 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). ...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.
jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago
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. THIS is a book about business.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I worked for GE, back in the 1980s. It was the “Neutron Jack” era. The subunit I worked for, was almost supernaturally dysfunctional. I was there for 18 months, and they had 3 reorgs, in that time. 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. Ah…fun times…
- passwordoops 1y ago
  Sounds similar to the stories I hear coming out of Boeing
  - consumer451 1y ago
    As you may already know, the McDonnell Douglas management team that took over Boeing has a direct line back to GE's Jack Welch. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/boeing-corporate-greed-airline-safety/ https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/boeing-corporate-...
    - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      Are you talking about the management team that moved to DC, because why does management need to bother itself with the widgets or be tied to, you know, their product, they need be focused on the grift?
      - kamaal 1y ago
        People who don't come from a hardcore engineering background, often fail to understand what goes behind making good engineering deliverables. This problem has complicated since MBA types people have taken over. Everything is a cost center, and goes into some model in a spreadsheet. The 'What If' feature gives you all kinds of fairly tale cost savings and optimisation options, as you turn the dials and knobs. There is also a failure to understand that some amount of extra investments in people, quality and training is needed to keep the profits going. It might appear like they are not contributing to profits directly, but as it often happens eliminating them causes loss. You are basically trying to modify a highly complicated and delicate process, optimised over years of lessons, changes and far sightedness. Trying to optimising entirely from a cost perspective leads to all kinds of counter intuitive results.
tonyhart7 1y ago
basically business man running engineering company
IAmBroom 1y ago
Interesting. This thread seems to be more about whether or not AI wrote the article, than the article's contents. Easier to make yourself into a witch-smeller than a bonifide expert in what the witches are talking about, I guess.
TomMasz 1y ago
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). I imagine those GE workers who were young enough probably moved elsewhere, but the older ones didn't fare so well.
- itishappy 1y ago
  Here's an interesting article on the history of the plant. Sounds like employment peaked in 1966 with 17 thousand employees before dropping to 7500 in 1972 and staying roughly stable until the 90s. Apparently they've been building radar there since 1987, and I can confirm that's still the purpose of the Lockheed-Martin plant. https://www.syracuse.com/living/2019/09/an-historical-timeline-of-the-lockheed-martin-plant-in-salina-photos.html https://www.syracuse.com/living/2019/09/an-historical-timeli...
  - squeedles 1y ago
    Thanks for the history! Been driving past that plant for almost 40 years going back and forth across the state. I was surprised when the article opened with what it said was the worlds first transistor radio, because I always thought that was the TR-1. It looks like GE made a prototype, but never took it to market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_TR-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_TR-1
    - itishappy 1y ago
      I'm in the same boat. Been living here roughly 30 years, but this article was the first I'm learning about this fascinating bit of history! Glad the parent comment mentioned it!
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago
'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.
Gud 1y ago
Full disclosure: I work for GE. And in my opinion we are doing some amazing things right now. I don’t think GE is dead at all.
- itishappy 1y ago
  Agreed, but today's GE is quite different from it's former self. The article touches on this: > But complexity has a cost when multiple things collapse at once. The power business cratered in 2017 and the insurance liabilities exploded and oil prices collapsed. CEO John Flannery launched "Project Eisenhower," a secret plan to break up the company. His successor, Larry Culp, made it official: After 126 years, the conglomerate would split into three. > The final irony? The same GE labs that created the first US jet engine, the MRI, and LED lighting still exist. In 2024, they're developing hydrogen-powered aircraft engines and 3D-printing technology that would have amazed Edison. But the conglomerate that funded them is gone.
  - Gud 1y ago
    This is all from almost a decade ago. GE Vernova is doing fantastic. Splitting the conglomerate was probably a wise move.
    - marbro 1y ago
      [dead]
lenerdenator 1y ago
But think of all of the value created for shareholders!
Tycho 1y ago
I read Jack Welch’s autobiography Straight from the Gut. 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. Btw, there’s a great interview with the author of Power Failure on the Bloomberg Masters in Business podcast.
- bredren 1y ago
  Link to podcast mentioned above: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/masters-in-business-bloomberg-qPacDsiFV_J/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/masters-in-business-blo...
TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago
GE's stock is one of the best performers this year. Would love to hear a "How they turned it around" follow up.
- squeedles 1y ago
  They turned it around by not being GE anymore. The stock trading as "GE" now is just GE aircraft engines, aka "GE Aerospace". The healthcare stuff went to "GE Healthcare" (GEHC) and power systems went to "GE Vernova" (GEV)
  - hangonhn 1y ago
    They also sold GE's profitable GE biotech division to Danaher where Larry Culp was the previous CEO. The proceeds was then used to shore up the finances of GE. GE finance was spun off into Ally bank. The other part of the turnaround though was the pension. Pension funds in a zero interest rate environment is a giant liability. That was a huge part of what drag down GE's finances for a while. Once the interest rate started to go back up again, the pension liability shrunk by a lot. Overall, GE is in a much better position now then it was in the past two decades. I don't know why the post ends up on such a negative note. GE has been severely humbled but I think it's well positioned to grow again. I've invested in GE twice, both during its downturns. This time I'm holding onto it because I think it's structurally in a better place than it was before.
    - mixdup 1y ago
      GE Finance was spun off into Synchrony Bank. Ally Bank is the former General Motors Acceptance Corp (GMAC) the former finance arm of GM pre-financial crisis bankruptcy
datavirtue 1y ago
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.
geodel 1y ago
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. 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.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 1y ago
I am reminded of my time at Xerox: Financialisation, making numbers, frequent reorgs, looking down on software... 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.
ViktorRay 1y ago
I haven’t read this book but I read another excellent book about the fall of GE. The book’s name was Lights Out. Here is a positive review of that other book from Bill Gates: https://www.gatesnotes.com/lights-out https://www.gatesnotes.com/lights-out
sydbarrett74 1y ago
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.

238 points by gwintrob 1y ago

”The company ran on quasi-religious faith that the right leader could bend markets and reality itself.” Hm, doesn’t ring a Bell.

AStonesThrow 1y ago
Did someone say "religious"? https://computer.rip/2020-06-14-manifest-telephone.html https://computer.rip/2020-06-14-manifest-telephone.html I said that religion does not thrive under capitalism, and of course this was the fate met by the Bell system. The breakup of the Bell system in 1982 occurred primarily in response to their very high rates, which were (accurately) seen as symptomatic of the monopoly they enjoyed. CNBC Reporting Live from Jack Welch's funeral, March 5, 2020: https://youtu.be/6opKFgvRzjE?si=ynbAEYEZBCzfuTqE https://youtu.be/6opKFgvRzjE?si=ynbAEYEZBCzfuTqE Nobody is wearing masks, but there is a lot of name-dropping by the field reporter, Robert Frank, and a full obituary in the dooblydoo; don't miss them
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Widespread mask mandates were still a few weeks away on March 5.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    Only if you mean """Mask mandates""" that had no enforcement. At one point here in southern Maine, we encouraged people to stay at home if you didn't need medical attention, but at no point were cops legally allowed to pull you over without standard probable cause, and you were committing no crimes by being out and about without masks. Companies who disallowed you inside without a mask were exercising their first amendment right to association to not associate with people who could cost them money by getting their workers sick. A renowned local pizza company spent that summer loudly crying about mask mandates and loudly not conforming to gentle asks to increase spacing and limit indoor dining. They were documented as the site of several significant outbreaks and now the company is dead. Because people stopped going. Because nobody cares so much about pizza that they want to catch something that is from an inconvenience all the way up to lethal.

ivraatiems 1y ago

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 feel AI generated. Sounds like an interesting book but the article says remarkably little.

cogogo 1y ago
Felt like a summary - not sure I even considered AI even if it didn’t read like a critical review. I do really want to read the book. Jack Welch is a case study in hubris. And I worked for a startup that had a relationship with Immelt. We kept trying to use breakfasts and dinners with him as a marketing ploy…
gwintrob 1y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I try to keep track of quotes I like when I'm reading. This was an attempt to bundle them up into some useful themes. I'll try to expand into something more opinionated for the next one :)
- cr125rider 1y ago
  I liked how it was laid out. I consume information like that well. Thanks for the write up.
- Cogito 1y ago
  Just reiterating what cogogo stated in a sibling, but the thing that threw me was the 'review' in the title. I was expecting some critique or comparison but instead saw summary and highlights. I enjoyed the summary and highlights, and learnt about some details I would likely have never otherwise seen, so I think it's just the framing that seemed 'off'. Depending on your intent consider reframing or adding critique, but I think the content is good and I appreciate you making it. [edit] There is some critique and comparison in the opening: "Shakespearean tragedy" and "The result is equal parts invention history, boardroom knife-fight, and forensic accounting thriller." but I think these are the only ones. I would love to know why you think this, and what you like about your "favorite ideas" (and any things you didn't like!)

squeedles 1y ago

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. 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. Sounds like Power Failure covers a lot of the same material as these two earlier books perhaps with some historical material.

tonyarkles 1y ago
> 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. The parts about Boeing in that book are... rough. Not rough as in "poorly-written" but rough as in "holy hell is that ever a brutal way to ruin a good company". Excellent book but lol it's not a feel-good read :)
- Barbing 1y ago
  Maybe a decade ago I read from critics concerned a shift to an aggressively globalized supply chain was certain to wreak havoc on Boeing’s quality control. e.g. safety-critical nuts and bolts used to be produced down the street, now you get a few nuts from say Thailand and a few bolts from Malaysia… the critics complained it was certain to lead to problems. Was that a part of what you read about in that book?
  - tonyarkles 1y ago
    Not significantly no, it was much more focused on the McDonnell-Douglas reverse acquisition. To summarize: McDonnell-Douglas was failing and bought Boeing with Boeing’s own stock (technically Boeing bought McDonnell-Douglas with Boeing stock but in practice McDonnell management assumed control). MD’s executives were Jack Welch protégés and did the same thing to Boeing that happened to GE.

roenxi 1y ago

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). 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. 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.

rlkf 1y ago
In Norway, the companies are required by law to pay the pensions into a special type of investment account where withdrawal are not allowed until you are retired, but you can choose your own investment profile: A mandatory 401k. The arrangement where the _company_ controls the account seems to me to be more of a allowed delay in salary payout, to the benefit of the company, than a retirement account for the employee.
- varjag 1y ago
  The savings are managed by bank or insurance companies' subsidiaries who are entirely unrelated to the employer. In other words it has nothing to do with mid century corporate pensions.
- lazide 1y ago
  The real fun situation is when the 401k requires mandatory investment in the company stock. None of the responsibility, all the moral hazard.
  - collinmcnulty 1y ago
    This was made illegal in the US after Enron.

zdw 1y ago

Note that GE is one of the example companies in the Collins/Porras book "Built to Last". I'd love to see an explanation of what went wrong from those guys.

Hilift 1y ago
Those were great books, but it doesn't age well when you fawn over Walgreens and a few years later the books have an aged like milk patina. I worked for GE for a couple of years. They are a conglomerate. They acquired other companies. I worked for a company where GE was the largest customer, and GE acquired it. If a company started to perform poorly, it wouldn't be long before it would either be sold or split apart. The company I was working at probably would have failed anyway due to rapid competition, but since GE used a lot of its products it was sort of a no brainer until an alternative was found. Acquiring and sunsetting companies is not uncommon now, but back then it wasn't received well and backlash accumulated over time. They had/have a huge part of the jet engine market. Due to their size and executive connections, they were capable of landing large contracts, such as defense and aerospace. They aren't successful if compared to Meta for example, that nets $70 billion per year. GE acquired the power grid component of Alstom, a French company in 2014. That company was previously fined by the US DOJ for $772 million for FCPA violations (bribes). (This was back in the US World Police days). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Judicial_investigations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Judicial_investigations
marbro 1y ago
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rtpg 1y ago

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.

delibes 1y ago

GE "created the jet engine"? British would disagree

gwintrob 1y ago
Learned something new! First US jet engine - https://www.ge.com/history-ge-aerospace https://www.ge.com/history-ge-aerospace. Thanks for pointing it out.
UberFly 1y ago
Context: "Sir Frank Whittle, an English engineer, is credited with inventing the jet engine. He patented the design for the turbojet engine in 1930, and his work led to the first operational jet engine in 1937. Independently, Hans von Ohain in Germany developed a similar jet engine, with the first flight powered by his design occurring in 1939. Both are recognized for their pioneering contributions, but Whittle's work laid the foundational concepts."
- WalterBright 1y ago
  All modern jet engines are based on Ohain's axial flow design, not Whittle's radial flow one. Ohain's engine first ran in 1937. The Heinkel HE178 was the first flying jet airplane, with Ohain's engine. The Me262 was the first operational jet fighter, again with Ohain's engine.
  - jansan 1y ago
    > The Me262 was the first operational jet fighter, again with Ohain's engine. I think "Ohain's engine concept" would be more correct. Ohain worked at Heinkel and developed the HeS 011 engine. However, the Me 262 was equipped with the Junkers Jumo 004, which was based on Ohain's design, but developed without him. The first test flights were actually done in 1942 with two BMW Typ P 3302 turbines (later called BMW 003).
    - WalterBright 1y ago
      "Granted a patent for his turbojet engine in 1936, Ohain joined the Heinkel Company in Rostock, Germany. By 1937 he had built a factory-tested demonstration engine and, by 1939, a fully operational jet aircraft, the He 178. Soon after, Ohain directed the construction of the He S.3B, the first fully operational centrifugal-flow turbojet engine. This engine was installed in the He 178 airplane, which made the world's first jet-powered aircraft flight on August 27, 1939." https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/ww2/projects/jet-airplanes/planes.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/ww2/projects...

twoodfin 1y ago

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). 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. 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.

gwintrob 1y ago
There's an alternative world where they didn't focus so much on financing and GE Capital. You make a good point that they still would have a diverse set of businesses that would be hard/awkward to build in parallel.
floatrock 1y ago
Capital markets do these kinds of spin-offs regularly. Problem is usually these spin-offs happen because it becomes clear the parent org has been doing something nasty that's going to create tons of legal liability, and the spin-off is really protecting the parent from lawsuits. DuPont is in the news recently with how they did this with PFAS pollution. Sure, sue the "PFAS company" into oblivion, but thankfully the PFAS polluter is no longer DuPont or DuPont investors. Not DuPont's problem that Teflon pan sales can't make up for the costs of all the associated environmental cleanup. This happens frequently with pharma companies when internal testing shows there might be some long-term side-effects before it becomes clear in public studies. I think I remember hearing this playbook was used with asbestos back in the day.
Spooky23 1y ago
I think GE is a tragic story in that they painfully and successfully navigated the transition from legacy giant manufacturer to the global economy, but overdid it. Growing up in an area with a big presence (one of their division HQ), I did alot of early career business with them. They were shady everything was purchased with weird leasing agreements with themselves, etc. The business strategy was good, but the demands to return growth powered by financial engineering ultimately killed the company.

rkagerer 1y ago

"financialization and imperial CEOs destroyed a 130-year industrial icon"

fisherjeff 1y ago

"Jeff has the unfortunate task of following a legend. It's like being a baseball player and following Babe Ruth." - Jack Welch, 2001 God that’s insufferable, even by Jack Welch’s standards.

irjustin 1y ago

The saddest thing to me about this - is the cut of pensions. 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. 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.

mgh95 1y ago
Honestly, I think people are beginning to see pensions through the lens of the common adage "if something is too good to be true, it probably is". I just think it's a sign of the times where the population isn't expanding as rapidly and the promises made by pensions simply can't be kept.
- hoseyor 1y ago
  It was always a fraud of future promises, an actual and literal con job. It is the inherent risk of trusting others, strangers nonetheless, with your own future, let alone “retirement”. It is another one of those core metrics, even if a lagging one, that should be used to evaluate whether government has failed; the delta between how secure someone would currently be if they had just invested all the pension/social security money that was stolen/defrauded from them. Most of our governments would be exposed as the failed governments they are.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Social Security was always a wealth transfer scheme, not an investment scheme.
  - mgh95 1y ago
    This goes directly to the question of the PBGC giving bailouts (https://www.pbgc.gov/arp-sfa https://www.pbgc.gov/arp-sfa) rather than windups and dissolution. These bailouts -- and the decisions if a pension fund should be forcibly closed -- are political in nature. For example, Biden bailing out the Teamsters pension fund (https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/11/01/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-1-2-million-pensions-protected-under-biden-harris-administration-celebrates-historic-support-for-unions/ https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...) or the decision by congress to ignore the fact that CalPERS has continuously below the 80% recommended funding for non-governmental pensions putting a 1.7T time bomb in play. In essence, government is failing to play one of its more essential roles of regulator.

azalemeth 1y ago

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...): -- 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. -- 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. -- 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. 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.

fluidcruft 1y ago

KnuthIsGod 1y ago

Looks and reads like LLM dreck. Perhaps it is time to have rules about the submission of AI generated trash to HN as faux-articles.

getnormality 1y ago
I don't think it's entirely AI-generated. The review selects details and explains them logically, e.g. why GE was able to financialize itself. AI slop doesn't have logic, it just treats the text as a bag of words and vaguely gestures at the overall vibe. On the other hand, the Key Quotes are not really that key, and some of the bullet points don't really work (it's not clear how the LTC insurance time bomb can be considered an accounting trick).
deleted 1y ago
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postexitus 1y ago
That's my feeling as well. Nowadays it's getting harder to differentiate between LLM "dreck" and genuine bad writing that feels like personal notes of some uninitiated reader.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
What is the difference between AI generated and paid-per-word fiverrr writers? Because the bar is on the floor when it comes to writing sometimes.

JackYoustra 1y ago

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. 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). ...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.

jxjnskkzxxhx 1y ago

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. THIS is a book about business.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I worked for GE, back in the 1980s. It was the “Neutron Jack” era. The subunit I worked for, was almost supernaturally dysfunctional. I was there for 18 months, and they had 3 reorgs, in that time. 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. Ah…fun times…

passwordoops 1y ago
Sounds similar to the stories I hear coming out of Boeing
- consumer451 1y ago
  As you may already know, the McDonnell Douglas management team that took over Boeing has a direct line back to GE's Jack Welch. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/boeing-corporate-greed-airline-safety/ https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/boeing-corporate-...
  - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    Are you talking about the management team that moved to DC, because why does management need to bother itself with the widgets or be tied to, you know, their product, they need be focused on the grift?
    - kamaal 1y ago
      People who don't come from a hardcore engineering background, often fail to understand what goes behind making good engineering deliverables. This problem has complicated since MBA types people have taken over. Everything is a cost center, and goes into some model in a spreadsheet. The 'What If' feature gives you all kinds of fairly tale cost savings and optimisation options, as you turn the dials and knobs. There is also a failure to understand that some amount of extra investments in people, quality and training is needed to keep the profits going. It might appear like they are not contributing to profits directly, but as it often happens eliminating them causes loss. You are basically trying to modify a highly complicated and delicate process, optimised over years of lessons, changes and far sightedness. Trying to optimising entirely from a cost perspective leads to all kinds of counter intuitive results.

tonyhart7 1y ago

basically business man running engineering company

IAmBroom 1y ago

Interesting. This thread seems to be more about whether or not AI wrote the article, than the article's contents. Easier to make yourself into a witch-smeller than a bonifide expert in what the witches are talking about, I guess.

TomMasz 1y ago

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). I imagine those GE workers who were young enough probably moved elsewhere, but the older ones didn't fare so well.

itishappy 1y ago
Here's an interesting article on the history of the plant. Sounds like employment peaked in 1966 with 17 thousand employees before dropping to 7500 in 1972 and staying roughly stable until the 90s. Apparently they've been building radar there since 1987, and I can confirm that's still the purpose of the Lockheed-Martin plant. https://www.syracuse.com/living/2019/09/an-historical-timeline-of-the-lockheed-martin-plant-in-salina-photos.html https://www.syracuse.com/living/2019/09/an-historical-timeli...
- squeedles 1y ago
  Thanks for the history! Been driving past that plant for almost 40 years going back and forth across the state. I was surprised when the article opened with what it said was the worlds first transistor radio, because I always thought that was the TR-1. It looks like GE made a prototype, but never took it to market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_TR-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_TR-1
  - itishappy 1y ago
    I'm in the same boat. Been living here roughly 30 years, but this article was the first I'm learning about this fascinating bit of history! Glad the parent comment mentioned it!
  - deleted 1y ago
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MetaWhirledPeas 1y ago

'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.

Gud 1y ago

Full disclosure: I work for GE. And in my opinion we are doing some amazing things right now. I don’t think GE is dead at all.

itishappy 1y ago
Agreed, but today's GE is quite different from it's former self. The article touches on this: > But complexity has a cost when multiple things collapse at once. The power business cratered in 2017 and the insurance liabilities exploded and oil prices collapsed. CEO John Flannery launched "Project Eisenhower," a secret plan to break up the company. His successor, Larry Culp, made it official: After 126 years, the conglomerate would split into three. > The final irony? The same GE labs that created the first US jet engine, the MRI, and LED lighting still exist. In 2024, they're developing hydrogen-powered aircraft engines and 3D-printing technology that would have amazed Edison. But the conglomerate that funded them is gone.
- Gud 1y ago
  This is all from almost a decade ago. GE Vernova is doing fantastic. Splitting the conglomerate was probably a wise move.
  - marbro 1y ago
    [dead]

lenerdenator 1y ago

But think of all of the value created for shareholders!

Tycho 1y ago

I read Jack Welch’s autobiography Straight from the Gut. 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. Btw, there’s a great interview with the author of Power Failure on the Bloomberg Masters in Business podcast.

bredren 1y ago
Link to podcast mentioned above: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/masters-in-business-bloomberg-qPacDsiFV_J/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/masters-in-business-blo...

TrapLord_Rhodo 1y ago

GE's stock is one of the best performers this year. Would love to hear a "How they turned it around" follow up.

squeedles 1y ago
They turned it around by not being GE anymore. The stock trading as "GE" now is just GE aircraft engines, aka "GE Aerospace". The healthcare stuff went to "GE Healthcare" (GEHC) and power systems went to "GE Vernova" (GEV)
- hangonhn 1y ago
  They also sold GE's profitable GE biotech division to Danaher where Larry Culp was the previous CEO. The proceeds was then used to shore up the finances of GE. GE finance was spun off into Ally bank. The other part of the turnaround though was the pension. Pension funds in a zero interest rate environment is a giant liability. That was a huge part of what drag down GE's finances for a while. Once the interest rate started to go back up again, the pension liability shrunk by a lot. Overall, GE is in a much better position now then it was in the past two decades. I don't know why the post ends up on such a negative note. GE has been severely humbled but I think it's well positioned to grow again. I've invested in GE twice, both during its downturns. This time I'm holding onto it because I think it's structurally in a better place than it was before.
  - mixdup 1y ago
    GE Finance was spun off into Synchrony Bank. Ally Bank is the former General Motors Acceptance Corp (GMAC) the former finance arm of GM pre-financial crisis bankruptcy

datavirtue 1y ago

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.

geodel 1y ago

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. 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.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 1y ago

I am reminded of my time at Xerox: Financialisation, making numbers, frequent reorgs, looking down on software... 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.

ViktorRay 1y ago

I haven’t read this book but I read another excellent book about the fall of GE. The book’s name was Lights Out. Here is a positive review of that other book from Bill Gates: https://www.gatesnotes.com/lights-out https://www.gatesnotes.com/lights-out

sydbarrett74 1y ago

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.