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Nobody made working more miserable than Jack.

Here is my experience. I worked for a company that distributed for a major manufacturer. I launched a new mark segment with an existing product that was proven unsuitable. An engineering team was created to solve the issue. One manager, four engineers. Four hand picked engineers. We worked with the customer reengineered some critical components and successfully relaunched. Sat down had a beer with the engineer group manager. She told me she was required to rank her hand picked and successful team. Bottom ranked member would have his career destroyed, top ranked would be promoted.

This was a Six Sigma manufacturer who went all in on the Jack Welch system. What a mess.

I asked the manager how she would choose the low man. She said she would have to draw straws. Thanks Jack.

I worked for GE Appliances for 32 years.
Jack Welch instituted some really stupid policies, but the worst was his “management go-round”.
He did not believe that managers needed to know the businesses they were running.
Plastics guys would get put in charge of appliances.
Appliance guy goes to jet engines.
Constantly shifting people around resulted in wasted effort as the new guy undid his predecessor’s plan and implemented his own.

As I said, Jack was a numbers guy. Every team had to fit a bell curve and the bottom guy gets no raise, no promotions. Numbers, people don't matter. That's Neutron Jack.

Here's my GE story: I worked for them for a while but I'm going to talk about my father. He worked in the defense industry as a program manager for RCA. His primary competition was GE. Fortunately for him, GE in the 80s was crooked. They were censured, people went to jail and they were almost banned from doing defense work (they should have been). But too big to fail, I guess. So they old man would talk to his customers and say "do you want to do business with an bunch of unethical crooks that only care about numbers at any cost, or do you want to do business with a company that always plays it straight, always gets it done and all legally?"

Anyway the CEO of RCA robbed the company and broke it up. GE bought RCA's defense business for pennies on the dollar. All of sudden my old man was forced to go to all those customers and say "Uh, you know GE is a strong company and uh, well, ah hell. Forget it." He retired at the peak of his career rather than deal with trying to spin for an ethically challenged company.

By that time I was working there too and we had a dart board on the wall with a picture of Jack Welch taped to it. Everybody hated Jack Welch except for the people who embraced his buzzword bingo initiatives, people we all viewed as collaborators. Fortunately Neutron Jack only cared about NBC and sold us all off to a good company after a couple of years. But I know about Jack Welch. Believe me, I don't make excuses for him. I know people who worked for GE and weren't forced into an unwanted marriage with them and they loved it. Some may be on this thread and may resent my story. It's all true and all I can say to them is I assume that their plants weren't closed for no reason by Jack Welch.