Posted on 09/18/2022 10:22:37 PM PDT by NeverCheney
Long before the reign of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, there was Jack Welch.
Welch, who headed up the General Electric Company from 1981 and 2001, is often thought of as the first celebrity CEO, a businessman who wowed investors and mingled with celebrities.
"[Welch's] face was on the cover of magazines all the time," New York Times correspondent David Gelles says. "He emerged as sort of this imperial executive and helped define what I think is still with us today in the form of a certain amount of CEO worship."
In his book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, Gelles makes the case that Welch's ruthless cost-cutting and single-minded focus on quarterly earnings ultimately hurt both GE and American capitalism.
"Neutron Jack," as he became known, had a practice of ranking employees and automatically firing the bottom 10 percent every year; in Welch's first few years of leadership he fired more than 100,000 people in a series of mass layoffs and factory closures.
"Up until this point, people who had a job at a company like GE or IBM basically figured that they had a job for life. But he explicitly said that this notion was going to be a thing of the past under his watch," Gelles says.
Many of the jobs that Welch cut were sent overseas: "We see the first great wave of labor, American manufacturing labor, going abroad, and thus begins the real beginning of serious outsourcing that would, of course, decimate America's manufacturing base," Gelles says.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Wowva NY times guy writes a book about Jack Welsh who is dead and can’t defend himself, color me surprised
This was what Ross Perot referred to as the “sucking sound” of US jobs being sent overseas.
I remember Rush making Perot sound like a crazy man, a padded-cell nut, and I laughed along with the rest of Rush’s audience.
I now regret laughing at Perot, because he was right.
Welch would have a lot he’d need to defend himself on. I suspect you might not own GE stock, but it has cratered due to the massive debt Welch took on , and failed acquisitions. And Welch was a leader in shipping US jobs out of the country
We can comment on what he did, without having to comment on his character.
If he sent jobs overseas, that’s what he did.
Jack Welch was a self-serving, traitorous ass.
Part of the dumping of thousands of employees by companies was leftist congressmen deciding to change pension vesting rights from 10 years to 5 years. They knew what they were doing. Ted Kennedy, Howard Metzenbaum, and Joe Stolen, spit. Any fool could see what was going to happen.
Welch also gave us Six Sigma, which may have made sense applied to products manufactured in the millions, but it was applied to everything including products produced in the tens or hundreds, and to services and other products for which it made no sense.
And most of our pharmaceuticals...
However, if the product is not fully tested then using Six Sigma to pump out a bunch of identical pills or vials is only amplifying the problem.
Perot was definitely right about that particular point.
Too bad the Booshes were globalists.
Stay out da Booshes.
Can’t disagree. I saw another company follow the same sort of idiocy. No, as usual, I won’t name them. They were also listening to the wrong voices from Big 6 st the time. Wrecking themselves. I had worked for (a different) Big 6 years prior to that. Sheer stupidity.
at the time.
I don’t know anything about Jack Welch but I do know that NPR is a taxpayer funded leftist media organization that has turned many Americans into democrats. I doubt Mr. Welch has caused as much harm to the country as NPR/PBS.
NPR/PBS certainly are reliably leftist.
Can’t disagree with that.
Brooks and Shields were pathetically biased in what little I saw of them in 2008. Just awful.
I see you understand Six Sigma.
Having a defined process is good.
Thinking you can always measure outcomes to the nth degree, not so much.
Jack Welch enriched himself at the expense of many others.
He just picked 10% out of his rear end, not 1% or 5% etc. Just made up and it cost hundreds of thousand dearly.
He should have been fired as GE is a shadow of itself.
The one to be fired should be the CEO and manager and supervisor if they have 10% not working out!
FTA: So you see flashes of a temper. And that continues right on into his early days at GE, when, as a young associate, his first year at the company, he decides to quit because he learns that his colleagues got the same raise that he did and he thought he was doing better.
What an ego!! His boss should have let him quit! GE and all those people and their families would have been better off!
Searched on: Jack Welch fired how many people
Results:
112,000 people between 1980 and 1985
more than 250,000 employees during his two-decade tenure
Jack Welch famously argued that leaders should fire the bottom 10 percent of their workforce each year
Welch completely changed the internal dynamics of GE. When Jack took over, most of GE's profits came from manufacturing. When Jack left in 2001, most of its profits came from GE Capital, which was hugely involved in banking and finance. The DotCom Crash destroyed most of GE's remaining industrial base in 2001-2003. The Great Recession of 2008 destroyed most of GE Capital. |
I voted for Ross Perot, thought he was kind-of-nut’s, but still voted for him versus the other fools the republican party was trying to sell.
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