‘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...
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.
Jack once said something like ‘ “wouldn’t it be great to have a factory on a big boat, so you could just go to wherever costs were lowest?” He didn’t appreciate being quoted and said it was off the record, but everyone knew, that was classic Jack.