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What Happened to GE? (2021)

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Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#111

Post by PakG1 »

w10-1 wrote: post #104

If this is really Bill Gates talking about Jack Welch, we're in real trouble. It's simplistic to think there was a single cause of failure. Sure, toadyism might delay bad news, but how exactly did they lose their market and product advantages in each of their businesses? Partly I think it's just too easy to steal expertise once it can be packaged and processed, whether business or engineering or manufacturing. A lot…

I suspect that Bill Gates knows that it's simplistic to think there was a single cause of failure. In the book Breaking Windows, the author quotes Bill Gates complaining about people who think that companies fail because of one simplistic reason. I think he understands that it's complex.

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#112

Post by gttalbot »

What's striking about this article is Gates's refusal, even now, to say anything bad about Welch.

Why is that?

The vast majority of the bar culture problems are traceable to Welch, as is the shadiness of GE Capital.

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#113

Post by raverbashing »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #50

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/…

Six Sigma is Feng Shui for MBA heads

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#115

Post by paganel »

coliveira wrote: post #83
hakfoo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Industry was already lost when solar panels started to become a thing. That was never going to be a possibility for the USA, unless it changed its course.

Exactly, you weren't going to get talented, committed smart young persons into the solar industry in the late 2000s - early 2010s, all the money was in internet tech. No solar company could have competed with the 600k yearly comps provided by companies like Google to middle-rank engineers.

Tesla and everything Musk-associated bucked the trend for a while because of the literal personality cult surrounding him back then (a thing easily forgotten by now when everyone likes to hate him), that's why his companies were still able to get young talented engineers and working them very hard while not paying Google-like comps.

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#116

Post by Eisenstein »

rgmerk wrote: post #79
Swizec wrote: post #76

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?

Siemens is German and 3M is very much US.

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#118

Post by Eisenstein »

w10-1 wrote: post #104

If this is really Bill Gates talking about Jack Welch, we're in real trouble. It's simplistic to think there was a single cause of failure. Sure, toadyism might delay bad news, but how exactly did they lose their market and product advantages in each of their businesses? Partly I think it's just too easy to steal expertise once it can be packaged and processed, whether business or engineering or manufacturing. A lot…

The article written by Bill Gates very much glosses over anything Welch did, with the notable exception of praising him as someone who wrote a bunch of books and who was looked at as a visionary.

He goes on to mention a few things for the downfall:

* Lack of understanding of financial investments by the management and executives

* Encouraging hearing 'good news' and hiding 'bad news' by leadership, which meant they were ignorant of many festering problems that needed fixing

* Diversity in enterprise -- lack of ability for anyone to understand how all the pieces fit together

* Cooking the books to keep Wall Street happy

I think perhaps you took something from the article that wasn't present, or I missed the part where he attributed 'simplistic' causes.

However, in my personal opinion I think Gates is too close to the situation and the actors to have a qualified and unbiased opinion. Refusing to blame Welch for anything besides being slightly ignorant of financial complexities illustrates that he isn't willing to look at Welch's leadership critically.

Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)

#119

Post by fyrn_ »

adventured wrote: post #44
hackernewds wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple companies have turned into glorified financial firms with their core product becoming auxillary. Look at airline credit cards, Starbucks loyalty cards, Block's Bitcoin repository, AMZN investing in Rivian and so on.

Starbucks is a terrible example. That's like claiming the Costco membership makes the Costco retail business the auxillary. Or that Kroger/CVS/Walgreens membership/rewards cards do the same for those retail businesses (when in fact all they do is drive higher rates of return visits and higher sales). The Starbucks business remains almost entirely their retail service business.

Costco is a terrible example for the point you are trying to make. Costco (rather famously) makes most of it's money from the membership. https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/13/how-costco-actuall...

In a way, the cheap bulk goods are just a way to convince people to get the membership.

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