151–160 of 239 posts
Plenty of heartless comments in this thread. It's a shame really. Rest In Peace, Jack.
I don't have a strong opinion on Welch, but a) he fired lots of people from GE, and b) introduced stack ranking to the world, which got lots more people fired. Whether or not he was good for GE, he was a heartless man. Of course he gets a heartless response.
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It looks like this became the basis of American economy. And you can't loose your job, because you'll miss your mortgage or education payments and loose your health care. So you must do anything your employer tell you to do.
> because you'll miss your mortgage or education payments and loose your health care. This is why the sensible thing to do is to save up a cushion of 6 months. You can continue with your employer health care with COBRA for 6 months or a year.
Plenty of heartless comments in this thread. It's a shame really. Rest In Peace, Jack.
I don't have a strong opinion on Welch, but a) he fired lots of people from GE, and b) introduced stack ranking to the world, which got lots more people fired. Whether or not he was good for GE, he was a heartless man. Of course he gets a heartless response.
Anyone conservative you people dance on their grave.
Anyone socialist, including brutal dictators, you praise them.
It's as simple as that. I can find you many examples of this. Common theme between them all is their political ideology.
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That was more because of his restructuring in the early 90s. "As with a neutron bomb, the buildings are still standing but the people are gone." He didn't seem to understand GE's broad products businesses but did understand finance, so he continuously closed those operations.
> He didn't seem to understand GE's broad products businesses but did understand finance, so he continuously closed those operations. Uh...no. He was a trained chemical engineer, and understood products, manufacturing, and operations perfectly well. In his own words, here's why he emphasized finance: "My gut told me that compared to the industrial operations I did know, this business [GE Capital] seemed an easy way t…
A good MBA finance curriculum might kick off with the Modigliani-Miller theorem (M&M), which basically says:
1. Theoretically, you can't create value through your mix of financing. It doesn't matter whether you use 100% equity, 100% debt, or 50/50, your mix of financing won't create value (unlike good R&D for example).
2. #1 above is predicated on the absence of tax incentives, bankruptcy costs, agency costs, and asymmetric information, and the market being efficient.
The creators of M&M believed that the assumptions in #2 are mostly false most of the time. The beauty of the theory is in the assumptions themselves. Prescriptively, it basically says that your mix of financing matters only insofar as the assumptions in #2 are false for your project at your company in your country. If you start a division like GE Finance, and you start using complicated financial derivatives, you have several things to prove. You have to show which M&M assumptions are false for your company, to what degree they are false, that your suggested method of financing will take advantage of the M&M violations, and that the magnitude of financing matches the magnitude of M&M assumption violation (this last bit is important, GE really went hog wild with derivatives in a way that was completely not justified). GE Capital never passed the M&M sniff test.
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I think the core idea makes sense, at least intuitively. Remove the worst performers. Make room for better people. The issue is that you will always have "worst performers". There needs to be a minimally acceptable performance level. And you also need enough slack so that the churn isn't affecting overall performance.
Removing the worst performers is the issue, as you somewhat suggest. You don't want to remove the worst performers. You want to remove those don't do their jobs or don't fit in the company. This is very different.
It passes the "gut check". It "feels right".
And that's because it's vaguely in the right direction of a good idea.
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It looks like this became the basis of American economy. And you can't loose your job, because you'll miss your mortgage or education payments and loose your health care. So you must do anything your employer tell you to do.
> because you'll miss your mortgage or education payments and loose your health care. This is why the sensible thing to do is to save up a cushion of 6 months. You can continue with your employer health care with COBRA for 6 months or a year.
Jack was known as a sharp negotiator and a master of project management and contracts. His marriage failed one month after his wife of many years became "vested" in the pre-nuptial agreement. Suzie Welch was unavailable for comment at the time of publication. Welch demanded full commitment and high levels of performance from his employees. He trained all in the religion of Six Sigma, all the better to remove "waste" and "unnecessary costs" from GE products. He also trained all managers in "ethics" as a means for them to know and understand the limits of ethical behaviour, to know where the gray zone was in relation to those limits, and then to be able to "cluelessly" operate beyond the gray zone limits.
He is survived by countless GE customers who cheer the ongoing demise of the company, by arrogant former employees and managers who remain unemployed due to their catchphrase "this is how we did it at GE", and by many retirees doomed to eat catfood since their no-decision investment in GE stock has left them in penury.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like this became the basis of American economy. And you can't loose your job, because you'll miss your mortgage or education payments and loose your health care. So you must do anything your employer tell you to do.
> because you'll miss your mortgage or education payments and loose your health care. This is why the sensible thing to do is to save up a cushion of 6 months. You can continue with your employer health care with COBRA for 6 months or a year.
Technically he's not dead, he's just been downsized to increase shareholder value.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13041886
I guess as long as you're a Republican you're free game, even in death.
Steve Ballmer revered Jack Welch's rank-and-yank management style. During the 2000s and early 2010s Microsoft's stack-rank reviews were infamous for the internal politics created. Didn't matter if you had a full team of top-tier engineers, the bottom 15% WAS going to get managed out. Savvy managers would hire low-tier performers to protect the productive ones. That's the only lens through which I have to view Mr. Wel…
I find Netflix's model works better: allocating resources by visibility of a team. Roughly speaking, a manager gets a chunk of budget from her manager, and she can decide how big a package she gives to each of her team members. The more important a team becomes, the more budget the team gets. The more visible a person becomes to her manager, the more likely this person will get larger package. This comes with the fol…