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Comment by peppertree | Hacker News Reader

Jack Welch destroyed the company and wrote a book to brag about it.

Jack Welch got very rich and maintains a great reputation as a business leader despite destroying the company, and wrote a book to brag about it. "Getting away with it" is a key part of a juvenile power fantasy that motivates a lot of people, and at least one political party.

It boggles my mind that in MBA circles Welch is still considered "one of the greats". He took an innovative company and destroyed it with finance shenanigans. In a properly-functioning society he'd have been tarred and feathered, and business schools would use his name as a warning example of what not to do.

I really think the story of Percy Miller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_P) should be taught in business schools. Dude started out as a street-level drug dealer, and ended up becoming one of the most successful recording industry execs ever. He once paid Michael Jackson's lawyer $25K just to have lunch with him, so he could learn. He's not without controversy, but honestly, I'd rather learn about a true rags-to-riches story than a story about a slash-and-burn corporate tycoon.

Why not both?

>He took an innovative company and destroyed it with finance shenanigans.

How many times have we seen this exact thing play out?

Xerox, Kodak, IBM, HP, etc.

Some of it is due to technological change, but even that isn't necessarily the problem but rather the company's response to it (failing to invest, focusing on financial engineering rather than innovation, asset stripping, enriching executives at the expense of everyone else, etc.) is.

Boeing.

If you want to kill an engineering org, out the MBAs in charge and reward them over a quarterly time span. Never fails.

What isn’t apparent, is that at most orgs you can get a short lived lift in revenue by burning a technical asset for pennies on the dollar. 10% more revenue by reducing quality 50%, but the reduction in quality lags the revenue bump by a couple quarters. You look amazing and then move on.

> It boggles my mind that in MBA circles Welch is still considered "one of the greats".

Why? It’s the MBA dream to make out like a bandit and leave a trail of despair and destruction in your trail: any joy left over is value you failed to extract.

> any joy left over is value you failed to extract

One of the greatest lines ever

Oh man really? I liked this guy so much I got a book signed by him in early 2000s. Where can I read more

https://globalpi.org/research/how-jack-welch-destroyed-sloan...

https://www.ft.com/content/3f1ac0e6-f204-478d-8b64-54a699a12...

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits...

https://www.axios.com/2022/05/31/jack-welchs-questionable-le...

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Man-Who-Broke-Cap...

Turns out that if you hollow out a giant company you can turn out huge profits and it takes awhile for the corpse to fall.

See also: private equity firms that specialize in finding a business that is currently struggling for one reason or another so they can buy it out and siphon off all of the equity and jump ship before the regular creditors catch up. Lots of safe money to be made by dismantling the work of generations.

A decade ago, the father of my kid's friend ran a PE firm and I'll never forget the day at lunch when he laughingly mocked how the lifelong employees of the large ($50M/y revenue) family business he was gutting were "whining" about having their healthcare plan cut (not scaled back -- just eliminated). Evil SOB.

tl;dr - He turned GE into a financial services company, destroyed the culture of engineering that had built it, and bumped up their stock price via financial engineering. After he left, it's been a slow, painful trip downwards.

Oh, and he fought hard against the EPA and scientists who said PCBs had bad health consequences so that GE could continue dumping them into the Hudson river and not have to pay for the cleanup until 30 years later (when he was long since retired).

Old boss golfed with him. Suddenly everyone was a 6-Sigma blackbelt, or assigned on a 6-Sigma track, even outside of manufacturing. That lasted like two whole years. Bad times.

You can always check his Wikipedia page, where the "Criticism" section is longer than the "CEO" section.

Jack Welch is evil incarnate. He ought to be universally condemned for moral bankruptcy.

Worse than Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap? I think it's neck and neck.

Did Al Dunlap leave a massive gap in tons of pension funds?

The real problem with Welch is all his acolytes that spread his financial engineering to all kinds of other companies. It's like a metastasizing cancer.

I'd say NBCUniversally.

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