81–90 of 239 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“he gave himself an A for his execution of its operations, and an F for his choice of successor.” That alone disqualifies him as a leader “I did everything right but others screwed it up”.
And to be clear he was absolutely lying about that. Immelt was certainly a problematic leader, but a lot of the problems with GE happened under Welch. The biggest issue with GE was massive insurance liabilities for assisted living insurance which drastically exceeded anything GE predicted. Well Welch started the insurance business in GE and took on a lot of these liabilities. And while Immelt certainly had his proble…
The obvious answer is that it doesn't work. One is that inevitably you get done in by cost disease, the other is that LTC insurance has a narrow market of people that can afford it but are not rich enough that they don't need it.
Jack Welch is indirectly the reason I got fired at Oracle, because some group of bean counters thought it is smart to fire people regularly based on some subjective measurement. However I am very sad he died because I subsequently got a raise and met my wife at my next company.
See? Creative Destruction is real!
List of ideas:
1) Oracle fired me to save money, or something? But then replaced me with x number of fresh grad employees who have to be onboarded to my level of productivity?
2) My salary went up and I am much more productive at my new company, which is also a big corp... so theoretically I am more "efficiently allocated" and literally everything was a win/win?
3) But also like others said, it could all be luck and randomness and there are others who get very depressed and/or can't find any work at all?
It's very tough to say, there's no way to predict the future, so it's wise not to attach lots of meaning to anecdotes :)
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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Seven_Deadly...
My impression is that he was no management genius but rather fortunate in the timing of moving his company into the FIRE sector. All of that goodwill evaporated in the 09 crisis. Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions? I guess he also deserves the credit/blame for the ubiquity of Six Sigma.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For claims like that it helps to link to a source for the data. Making inflammatory statements without backing evidence makes for poor discourse IMO. I found this article that seems to cover the topic: https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Dredging-up-the-tru...
what I said is verifiable with a cursory web search, as you have shown. I know people with cancer linked to this pollution. Your standard of truth makes no room for any reporting of personal experience and is invalid.
In upstate New York he held back for over a decade any effort to mitigate legacy PCB pollution from GE’s mostly closed factories there. He funded AstroTurf organizations and downplayed research showing connections between PCB pollution and health problems.
3M also have been trying to cover up their responsibility for these health-damaging outcomes for decades.
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/31/3m-pfas-minnesota-pfoa-p...
My father worked his way up from the foundry to "Business Leader" (management) at GE, starting in the mid 1970s. GE was a mess internally, all the way down to the shop floor, before Welch took over. His impact cannot be understated. We were big Jack Welch fans - if he hadn't grown GE the way he did, my hometown - where it was the largest employer for decades - would have been a lot poorer.
However, it seems like a lot of his financial results came from "shaping" the quarterly earnings and various unsustainable practices. And for whatever reason his the culture he brought to the company has left his successors overseeing a company that has performed as one of the worst in the whole S&P over the last 15 years. Even if you take a pure industrial company like US Steel, which I don't think anyone would point to as being on the vanguard of management or product, GE is not doing all that well. I dunno. My pet theory is that "leaning" an organization is really a one-time thing, and that it's very challenging to do so without also removing the "seed corn" of research and even development of the next big thing. Though, to be fair, Edison himself had a wildly inconsistent financial record.
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…
Hiring folks to act as telomeres for your team seems so cruel.