Posted on 03/02/2020 6:01:00 AM PST by Enlightened1
Jack Welch, a railroad conductor’s son who became chairman and CEO of General Electric and led it for two decades, growing its market value from $12 billion to $410 billion, has died. He was 84.
His death was announced Monday by his wife, Suzy.
With a determination to win by busting up bureaucratic complacency, Welch earned two titles — “manager of the century,” and “Neutron Jack” for slashing tens of thousands of jobs. Under his leadership, GE became the world’s most valuable company, after Microsoft. Its fortunes later turned south.
While at the helm, Welch bought and sold scores of businesses, expanding the industrial giant into financial services and consulting. GE Capital Bank was founded seven years into his tenure. His acquisitions included RCA — then-owner of NBC — and Kidder Peabody, the brokerage that became entangled in an insider trading scandal.
He also streamlined the conglomerate’s bloated bureaucracy by giving managers free rein to make changes they deemed beneficial to the bottom line.
He invented the “vitality curve,” in which managers were ranked into three groups. The top 20% “A” group was “filled with passion, committed to making things happen.” The “vital” 70% “B” group was essential to the company and encouraged to join the A’s. Then there was the bottom 10% “C” group. “The underperformers generally had to go,” Welch said in his 2001 book, “Jack: Straight From the Gut.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
‘GE, under Welch, came in and the first thing they did was go into our factory and rip out all the specialized equipment and sell it.’
I was with RCA for a period of time, including when this happened...our plant in Lancaster Pa. was referred to as a ‘popcorn stand’, and such was not looked upon kindly by those who’d spent a lifetime under the Nipper banner...
Maybe, but when my company started hiring a bunch of GE six sigma dorks, guess who they applied it to? They even did it with yearly raises. 15% of each managers reports got zilch. It very much became all about sucking up.
...
Exactly. I think it’s terrible when applied to the rank and file. There will be a lot of back stabbing, too. Workers won’t cooperate to help fellow workers.
His methods might have been effective, but they generated YUGE resentments.
There are multitudes who would go far out of their way to p*ss on his grave. They are largely the people who are voting for Bernie and Fauxahontas today.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
I worked at the “meatball” (as the GE logo is known) in the mid-1980’s ... it was often said that GE’s best engineers worked in accounting, because under Welch, GE consistently met or beat the sales and earnings estimates ...
Worked for GE for 2 years in the mid 60s. Evendale Ohio at the Flight Propulsion Division. For a while they had me on 6 10s. But being exempt you didn’t get any extra pay. But I quit smoking the job was so exhausting. Under Welch.
What I liked about him is he was very direct, did not seem to equivocate. On the down side, he was not known as Neutron Jack for his management concepts. He and his first wife had an epic divorce which made the social pages quite a few times.
self-made billionaire.
Obama: “You didn’t build that”
Well this guy did.
Sorry jack will always be known for appointing Jeff Immelt as your successor.
My dad worked for GE for 39 years 1st and Schenectady New York and Utica New York and then Wilmington North Carolina basically became a self-taught nuclear engineer. He had first did not like Jack Welch during the first round of layoffs but came to respect him highly. That was a good one.
Another Globalist Free Traitor™ kicks off. Somehow I am not feeling the pain....
Hopefully he sold at least half his stock when Welch retired.
It’s not normal to off shore out, source and give away trade secrets to Communist dictatorships.
My dad worked for GE for 39 years 1st and Schenectady New York and
Hopefully he sold at least half his stock when Welch retired.
... I would have been too young to keep track of such things however my dad was not one who really dabbled in the stock market what much and you really didn’t have to because at that time treasury bills we’re about 10%. And I don’t think in his retirement fund he would have had more than 5% in General Electric stock. Also at that time he had a pension which my mom is benefiting from now.
I could live with Welch strip mining the business but the worst thing his people did was tell the government that we’d gladly take their money but we weren’t interested in expending or improving the system at all and that we were going to do the barest minimum possible to get paid. We had a superb relationship with our customers for decades and to this day 30 years later it has never recovered from that period of just a couple of GE years. We let them down and they don’t forget.
I had a feeling someone would reprimand me for praising him, after reading some of his background. Well, thank you for not doing that.
I remember seeing him on business shows and he always acted and sounded so rational and professional. I still like his memory, in spite of his warts.
Thanks again, Mouton.
“So he only applied the rule to managers to cut bureaucracy? I think a lot companies applied it to non-managers to lower costs and get rid of those who didn’t brown nose their manager.”
No; he didn’t. I was an Executive Secretary at GE in the late ‘90s through 2000 while Welch was there, and I LOVED the Vitality Curve. It benefited me every year in keeping my job. It was a great work atmosphere when he was running the show in that you were pushed (in a good way) to do more than you might have thought your limits were. And I also loved the generous management awards GE gave for extra achievements.
It was sad to see GE decline after he left.
I knew about Jane, not about Suzy. Jane caught him cheating. She got 180 million. The finslly settled so the detsils of his extravagant package from GE was not revealed. And supposedly Jane was having an affair with chauffeur of jacks good friend. Oh the lives of Rich and famous.
Still a GE employee. Retiring this year. This is not the “house that Jack built”.
He was definitely a force to be contended with. I worker at the nuclear energy division when he became president and you felt his presence down to the engineer level.
He brought in a much needed dose of reality to the company and ran a very tight ship. Quite a change from the gentlemanly Reginald Jones that preceded him.
But the worst decision of his life was choose Jeff Immelt as his successor.
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