141–150 of 160 posts
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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…
I do wonder how much of an attitude of "we don't need everyone to be successful, we just need enough" there is among policy makers. At this point, it seems that it's more cultural than a mere policy reorientation could fix to make the average student academically competitive again.
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.
Nature took its course, as charted by Jack Welch.
I'm the same age as Gates, so was equally immature back when Welch took over GE but I was not fooled for very long at all. Welch was 20 years older at the time, I was not impressed with the lack of acumen he had developed.
It was plain to see from almost the begining that Welch was ruining the company, he just didn't have what it takes naturally.
This was Edison's company.
>It’s also not a case of outright fraud, like Enron. It’s a textbook case of mismanagement of an overly complex business.
Resulting in financial shenanigans, like Enron.
It's just a matter of where regulators (and any underlying regulations) are functionally drawing the line between technically illegal and merely unethical financial manipulation at the time.
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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.
Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. Reagan laughed, removed them, and increased drilling.
But somehow nothing ever changes - when this article was written back in 2021, the financial analysts had a buy rating and the price per share was hovering around $10. Today it’s at $129, despite significant competition in all aspects of their business. Bill Gates can say he didn’t see it coming, but all that signals is business as usual - the giants of industry are so woven together they seldom see the train coming
GE's stock price was between about $70 to $87 in 2021.
After suffering through a new (lemon) GE-branded fridge, I don't see myself ever buying a GE-branded thing again. Fool me once. I have some hope that Samsung will learn from GE, and decide not to fully discard its more recent-era reputation for quality and excellence.
After suffering through a new (lemon) GE-branded fridge, I don't see myself ever buying a GE-branded thing again. Fool me once. I have some hope that Samsung will learn from GE, and decide not to fully discard its more recent-era reputation for quality and excellence.
I worked at Samsung for seven years. The culture at Samsung (mobile software division) was exactly as bad as GE. They had thousands of "engineers" fixing the same bugs over and over while the R&D was busy pushing absolute horseshit Powerpoints. I've owned Samsung ACs, TVs, phones, washers and dishwashers and most of them went kaput a year or two after installation.
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Aren’t the Japanese conglomerates perpetually underperforming businesses that get away with it because Japanese shareholders are toothless?
Berkshire Hathway is also a conglomerate, but it does perform fairly well.
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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.
Not really. The card/membership is useless without the retail aspect.
Though you could make this argument for gyms, which are notorious for selling a lot of memberships to people who lack/lose the motivation to use them.
I sometimes wonder if there is a single group of advisors, probably from the financial institutions, that gives advise to CEOs periodically, and then they just follow along to build a trend.
Isn't that the actual function of (big-brand) consultants? They roam from company to company, sharing current "best" practices, and tout that as one of the advantages of hiring consultants.