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Jack'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/05...

I can't recommend enough *Jack Welch Is Why You Got Laid Off | Behind the Bastards* (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZv7wc7USQE)

I 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.

The 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.

So, 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.

No way, HN is talking about equitable business? Is this a recession indicator?

This 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.

He 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.

Um, 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.

Interview with the author on PBS:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaCSbdNsLQk

By 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.

Related:

A Man Who Broke Capitalism – Did Jack Welch Destroy Corporate America? - 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 - June 2024 (3 comments)

> 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?

"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.

The 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.