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Jack Welch, the Man Who Broke Capitalism (2022)
- throw0101b 1y agoInterview with the author on PBS: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaCSbdNsLQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaCSbdNsLQk
- Stevemiller07 1y ago[dead]
- bux93 1y agoToday's CEOs have moved on to what's important: future metrics. The benefit of future metrics is that they can be plucked out of thin air and recycled, like the amount of years until your cars will drive themselves or the projected revenue from A(G)I.
- tuesdaynight 1y agoI agree with your point, but it's kind of ironic that you are answering a post made by a bot. From all the bullshit projections that tech CEOs made, the internet becoming full of bots is not the one that I expected to happen so fast.
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoI did, at this point 20 years ago it was already said that more than 90% of e-mail traffic was spam, and around that time a lot of anti-spam measures were already set up in things like comment sections and forums and the like. The battle hasn't stopped since then.
- baxtr 1y agoMaybe a stupid question: how can you know this was a bot?
- SoftTalker 1y agoAccount created very recently and the comment reads like a line in a USA Today article.
- dgfitz 1y agouser: Stevemiller07 created: 1 day ago karma: 3 about: I am an agency owner, i have multiple clients needing ai agents
- CHUCKZZZ 1y ago[dead]
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- flyinghamster 1y agoUm, why was someone's perfectly reasonable take downvoted to oblivion? Too much of a newcomer? Too many Welch devotees here? As far as I'm concerned, Welch turned GE from an industrial behemoth that more than lived up to its name, to a pale shadow of itself that has sold off almost everything. "Outsource Everything" has been an absolute disaster for our economy that will take decades to dig out of, if we even have the will to try.
- fidotron 1y ago> Um, why was someone's perfectly reasonable take downvoted to oblivion? Too much of a newcomer? Too many Welch devotees here? At the risk of a serious tangent, the bots here have become so out of control that there is also a major anti-bot pattern that downvotes anything that remotely looks like a bot. I know we aren't supposed to ever say HN is in decline, but LLMs really do look like they've killed it.
- flyinghamster 1y agoAt the rate things are going, LLMs are going to kill the entire web. I'm starting to think that's by design.
- tuesdaynight 1y agoThe rate is what is scaring me, honestly. I was expecting that the web would move even more to closed silos because of bots, but I was not expecting it to happen so soon. Maybe I'm too old for the rate of change of internet trends.
- bit1993 1y agoIt is easy to look at Globalization in retrospect and conclude that it was a failure but you will miss all the advances it brought with it. Globalization has its place and time, it was the logical next step after the USA industrialization peaked the next step to squeeze out even more from the economy.
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- rschiavone 1y agoI can't recommend enough *Jack Welch Is Why You Got Laid Off | Behind the Bastards* (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZv7wc7USQE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZv7wc7USQE)
- camillomiller 1y agoThe fundamental problem I have with this analysis is that it won’t consider a simple assumption: Jack Welch was just better at the capitalism game than others. He didn’t rewrite the written rules, he just didn’t care about the ethic-based unwritten ones. With the decline of historical ideologies, hyper-individualism took over. Welch was just very good at understanding that some invisible boundaries didn’t apply anymore, and that the zeitgeist was shifting in that direction.
- petesergeant 1y ago> very good at understanding that some invisible boundaries didn’t apply anymore, and that the zeitgeist was shifting in that direction. Sounds like Trump, for better or for worse
- pyrale 1y agoThe invisible boundaries did apply, and they still do. The story isn't that he saw that some rules no longer applied, it's that he was willing to go to war about it. Post WW2, we had gradually managed to build a less violent society, and at some point, some CEOs decided: "You know, the Ludlow massacre and the Bisbee deportation were not that bad". And now, we get the pushback, where some employees think that murdering a CEO in the middle of Manhattan is fair game. Rules didn't disappear. But people are more willing to go to conflict about them.
- tpmoney 1y ago> Post WW2, we had gradually managed to build a less violent society This feels like a whitewashing of a lot of post WWII history. That “less violent society” included the Korean and Vietnam wars, multiple assassinations, civil rights riots, the Kent State massacre and the Cold War. Was it that society was less violent or that we became more diverse in our ability to commit violence?
- pyrale 1y agoI'm not saying post-WW2 society was non-violent. I'm saying prior to WW2, sending the army (or just any hired goons) to shoot at workers was a common way to handle a strike in western countries. I'm saying at the turn of 20th century, people in colonies had their hands cut for not meeting rubber quota. etc. You are right to point out that things weren't (and aren't) perfect, but you'd be a fool to think that there was no improvement.
- bawana 1y agoBy his logic, he would replace most humans w machines and ai. Can you see a world of ‘bezos,musks,trumps’ types protected and provided with their machines while they despoil the flora and fauna of the earth. Economies of scale fail when scale becomes very large.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- roxolotl 1y agoAs a typical American teenage boy I had a bout of libertarianism in high school. Atypically however it ended with my reading of Atlas Shrugged. Somehow my take away from the book was that clearly there are limits to selfishness and there’s a point at which everyone is dependent upon the systems they live in. Real selfishness is largely selfless. It just felt so much like a childish fantasy that I took away something I suspect Rand would be upset about. Regardless I say that to say it bewilders me how easily we, well mostly Americans, fell into this trap of believing that most humans are unnecessary and all that matters is skill at amassing capital. After a certain point not only does the economy of scale break down the whole system collapses in on itself. I’m sure they’ll have a great time pontificating and self aggrandizing in the Gulch while everyone else is doing the real work of rebuilding.
- 9rx 1y ago> I say that to say it bewilders me how easily we, well mostly Americans, fell into this trap of believing that most humans are unnecessary I suppose in hindsight they have a point. So much human effort is merely discovery that, if perfect information existed, really would have been pointless and unnecessary. Those who land into the right information, even if only by dumb luck, end up amassing capital as a natural consequence, so to the outside observer such people appear to be the "chosen ones" who have it all figured out. This doesn't end with economics. In general, those who are deemed to not have the right information tend to be ostracized. To be wrong is the greatest sin a person, at least an American person, can make. This was particularly apparent during the high tensions of the COVID pandemic, where great friendships were lost when the parties involved couldn't agree on who had the right information. The flaw in all that, of course, is that perfect information doesn't exist. I suspect the idea that it does was fuelled heavily by the college marketing campaigns of a several decades ago — that which also brought us the idea if you don't get a degree, you'll be forever stricken to flipping burgers at McDonald's — selling the idea that perfect information is available if only you choose to accept it. But, before you get your panties in a knot, let it be emphasized that my suspicions could be wrong and that's okay. Perfect information doesn't exist.
- allenrb 1y agoSo, this aged well: Maybe we’re at that moment in a pendulum's arc where it pauses and starts to begin its trajectory back in the other direction. I hope we're there because we need to reset.
- exiguus 1y agoI see some parallels to Curtis Yarvin and the Boys that follow his philosophy. The funny part, with all this boys is, that they do not recognise, that there utopia e.g. new society/state, does not work without the current society that sponsors them. Basically, the same with some global corporations, which literally suck society dry (infrastructure, resources, education, labour, health system) and give almost nothing back (except for a few workers and too few taxes). I think the American dream is over. It's an empty shell that's all about making a nice life for yourself at the expense of others.
- notarobot123 1y ago> I think the American dream is over. It's an empty shell that's all about making a nice life for yourself at the expense of others. At which point in history was it not about exactly that?
- geodel 1y agoI think 1960 NE (Nostalgic Era) was great.
- throwawayoldie 1y agoDefinitely...as long as you were a white Christian heterosexual man.
- ajb 1y agoProbably the homesteading era. Although only if you don't count Native Americans...
- al_borland 1y agoEven then, it wasn’t an easy life, they just had different challenges. That’s why we have the right to pursue happiness, and not happiness itself. One can always pursue it, regardless of circumstance. Some would argue that the pursuit is where the happiness is actually found; it’s not a destination.
- alphawhisky 1y agoNo way, HN is talking about equitable business? Is this a recession indicator?
- specialist 1y agoMichael O. Church would just elicit nods of agreement on today's HN.
- marssaxman 1y agoI am surprised to see, looking at his account just now, that his last post was ten years ago. I hadn't realized it'd been so long.
- fsagx 1y agohttps://archive.is/Lq7Bu https://archive.is/Lq7Bu
- crowcroft 1y agoJack's greatest sin was transforming a manufacturing company into a financial institute. Similar to a family that takes on debt to appear wealthy it looks good in the short term but the debt always comes due eventually. It never came due in Jack's time and he looked like an absolute genius. His successor should have been able to defuse the debt bomb over time, but because of the expectations of success that Jack left behind (and some glaring failures of the new CEO) the bomb was left in place and debt continued to pile up. Of course the bomb went off eventually and the rest is history, GE is not a company anymore. Aside from the moral issues of Jack's approach (layoffs etc) the true sin is the over financialization of everything in America which I think Jack really set the tone for. I would highly recommend the book Power Failure with William Cohan. https://www.amazon.ca/Power-Failure-Rise-Fall-American/dp/0593084160 https://www.amazon.ca/Power-Failure-Rise-Fall-American/dp/05...
- snapcaster 1y agoLights Out is another great book on the process of financialization that killed GE
- busyant 1y agoThe amount of effusive hagiography devoted to Welch in the late 1990s and early 2000s was stupefying. I grew up in a "GE town" and watched it fall into severe neglect as GE's stock price rose. Watched my mother get laid off and pushed into a service company that she and many others referred to as "the bastard child of GE." I always felt that there was a lot of smoke-and-mirrors behind Welch & the stock price. And I felt that Welch would depart before the check came due. Immelt got hammered, in part, because of Jack's sins--I don't know if Immelt deserved it because I stopped paying attention to GE in the early 2000s. My opinion of GE was / is not based on some detailed and thorough analysis. It came from observing the disconnect between what happened to my hometown and the stock price.
- josefritzishere 1y ago"The book demonstrates how this shareholder maximizing version of capitalism has led to the greatest socioeconomic inequality since the Great Depression and harmed many of the very companies that have embraced it." That's got some zip.
- aklemm 1y agoThis is an important book with kots of parallels to The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, both good and bad. Ultimately, I think Welch-ian thinking is a dramatic abandonment of following first principles.
- NaOH 1y agoRelated: A Man Who Broke Capitalism – Did Jack Welch Destroy Corporate America? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33416436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33416436 - Nov 2022 (20 comments) A Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40838966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40838966 - June 2024 (3 comments)
- EasyMark 1y agoHe really had some of the worst ideas for longevity of a company. Valuing short term profits over long term plans and goals for the company is the biggest one. The other is probably his adversarial relationship with his employees. He didn't see them as anything other than "the help" and was constantly talking down to them, assumed they were lazy and looking for the easy path in life, in everything I ever read from him.
- mizzao 1y ago> The book covers 80 years—from the moments right after World War II and the way companies were behaving back then. This was the “golden age of capitalism” all the way to the highly unequal society we live in today. Can someone summarize how companies were behaving in this golden age, or what characterized them?