81–90 of 160 posts
Lesson from GE: Financial engineering is not engineering. Further lessons from GE: * Gaming the system internally or externally is something a CEO needs to actively manage and defeat, not reward. * Trying to turn businesses based on contracts for delivery (with lumpy revenue/risks) into contracts for service and recurring revenue is a dangerous game, because you take your eye off the ball that is delivering the produ…
What happened to GE? Simple. Jack Welch killed the golden goose. During his tenure he shifted focus and money away from long-term R&D in the name of boosting quarterly profits. Product development took a back seat to selling "services", i.e. focus more on selling contracts around maintaining your turbines than you do on developing and manufacturing good turbines in the first place. I won't even get into the heavy bor…
Wasn't Welch the one who was using "sack 10% of the managers each year" as a strategy? That one was obviously long-term stupid; I can see it being healthy for maybe a cycle or 2, but after that it would just kill off all the intangibles of management. At some level, every company relies on a culture of people doing the right thing to thrive over the long term. Although I do think that it is a mistake to just pin blam…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't Welch the one who was using "sack 10% of the managers each year" as a strategy? That one was obviously long-term stupid; I can see it being healthy for maybe a cycle or 2, but after that it would just kill off all the intangibles of management. At some level, every company relies on a culture of people doing the right thing to thrive over the long term. Although I do think that it is a mistake to just pin blam…
The reason US manufacturing excellence doesn't make sense is because we let it rot. We don't have cities like Shenzhen, where everything you need to get a product to market is within same-day courier range. I understand this was a feature of the old "hardware-centric" Silicon Valley, and it made fast iterations on new products a lot more viable. I wonder if we could even build a hub like that today, with property spe…
When researching washing machines recently, I was surprised to see that probably the most innovative mass-market systems available right now are from GE. They’ve brought out a heat-pump based low-energy use combined washer/dryer* that supposedly performs great - something that can’t be said for existing combo or low energy systems. I was surprised to see innovative appliances from GE! I thought they had been reduced…
People who know about appliances say "Never buy a Samsung appliance or an LG refrigerator." Curiously enough, the most-hawked appliances at Home Depot are...
GE exported a lot of the Welch insanity. Anyone unfortunate enough to be forced into Six Sigma training will attest to the agony. This was through their own and licensed training orgs, their people who left to run other companies, and this guy, a sort-of Erdős-for-business that spread a lot of the frobozztik into other C-level offices. (No idea how much of it he came up with.) https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/…
> For example, Gryta and Mann report that GE would sometimes artificially boost quarterly profits by selling an asset (e.g., a diesel train) to a friendly bank, knowing that it could then buy back the asset at a time of GE’s choosing. So fraud?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Conglomerates of disparate businesses never work in the long term Tell that to Yamaha, Mitsubishi, Siemens, 3M, etc
Aren’t the Japanese conglomerates perpetually underperforming businesses that get away with it because Japanese shareholders are toothless?
GE is the textbook for "The fate of a company that focuses too much on optics and forced stack-ranked attrition". And yet, companies these days follow the same path and predictably crash and burn.
GE exported a lot of the Welch insanity. Anyone unfortunate enough to be forced into Six Sigma training will attest to the agony. This was through their own and licensed training orgs, their people who left to run other companies, and this guy, a sort-of Erdős-for-business that spread a lot of the frobozztik into other C-level offices. (No idea how much of it he came up with.) https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/…
I was at a heavy equipment company that was sold on 6 Sigma. It was so bad. So much quality theater. Teams were culled of their “high potential” employees, who were sent off to become black belts and lead random projects with fancy story boards and amazing $$$ saved charts. I think it honestly was what seeded my departure a few years later.
Somehow the projects didn't feel like diverting people and budget to makework tasks that fit the Six Sigma model as opposed to their reality. It eventually faded to be replaced by other codswallop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't Welch the one who was using "sack 10% of the managers each year" as a strategy? That one was obviously long-term stupid; I can see it being healthy for maybe a cycle or 2, but after that it would just kill off all the intangibles of management. At some level, every company relies on a culture of people doing the right thing to thrive over the long term. Although I do think that it is a mistake to just pin blam…
The reason US manufacturing excellence doesn't make sense is because we let it rot. We don't have cities like Shenzhen, where everything you need to get a product to market is within same-day courier range. I understand this was a feature of the old "hardware-centric" Silicon Valley, and it made fast iterations on new products a lot more viable. I wonder if we could even build a hub like that today, with property spe…
Why is that a problem? Isn't that what "building" a hub means?
What do you think Shenzhen was before it got the SEZ designation?