What Happened to GE? (2021)
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What Happened to GE? (2021)
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Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)
#2They messed up when they sold NBC to Kabletown
Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)
#3They messed up when they sold NBC to Kabletown
The amount and subtlety of inside-GE jokes in the first year or two of 30 Rock were just "chefs-kiss".
Also, Jack Welch. :(
Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)
#4> 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?
Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)
#5What 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 borrowing and use of GE Capital to turn the company into a casino that happens to make a few things on the side.
Put another way, if you took every shortsighted MBA-driven business fad of the 80's and 90's and turned it into a person, you'd get Jack Welch. Sadly, his methods were very very good at juicing short to medium term profits, so firms all over the U.S. were quick to copy his methods, which did more damage to American innovation than any foreign power could dream of.
Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)
#6GE is General Electric Corporation
Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)
#7> 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?
It's fraud, but it's legal in the same way insider trading is legal so long as you're a member of congress.
Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)
#8What 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…
There was a time when American corporations discovered that financial services were more profitable than manufacturing. The biggest division of GM was GMAC.
The "profits" were at least partially fraudulent -- division managers cooking the books in order to make their numbers. I seem to recall that some of them went to prison.
Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)
#9GE 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.
Re: What Happened to GE? (2021)
#10What 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…
It's interesting, isn't it. Jack Welch must have had very many superb characteristics, to be as revered as he was. Or is it an element that the profits of golden-goose-killing created the mystique?