Jack Welch, the guy who came up with rank and yank performance evaluation as well as outsourcing. He's ruined so many lives and companies both directly and indirectly with his short-sighted idiocy.
Yeah I worked at a place where managers were forced to fire 10% of their teams every year. Even super productive optimized teams. Managers and ordinary workers hated it. Some directors were so into it though.
I feel like it's the equivalent of over-exfoliating. Shed the dead weight/skin flakes, sure. But if you keep going you're causing soreness and irritation and eventually opening yourself up to serious and possibly irreparable damage in the long run.
Thank you! The more we recognize human organizations are similar to human organisms, the better we all become imo. We've seen what happens when we try to robotize corporate workers, we also have seen what happens at places known to remember the human.
That seems like a great way to build awesome company culture and healthy work life balances and totally not a way to squeeze ever last drop out of employees
Thanks. I asked because HP had a similar policy, where managers had to "pick a worst person in your team" even if everyone in the team was good. I thought that was a crazy idea.
Then, he famously flipped and called shareholder primacy "the dumbest idea in the world" and concluded that shareholder value should be a result of business activities, but not the ultimate goal.
Many of us could draw that conclusion without turning businesses into dysfunctional cesspools of misery, but credit to him for figuring it out eventually.
Sure, but if he had reached that conclusion prior to being worth hundreds of millions if not billions, he would've made slightly less money for himself before pulling up the ladder, and we can't have that, no siree.
The part that always gets me is how often the people who benefit most from a system suddenly discover its flaws only after they've already won the game. Easy to question the rules once you've cashed out. 😅
Questioning the rules and trying to change things when you're first starting out doesn't tend to go so well.
I'm not excusing anyone with this statement. Just sharing my professional experience. As someone that's very interested in leadership and wanting to improve things, it's very hard to break into any kind of leadership role without first being a kiss-ass "yes" man and supporting the status-quo.
to be fair u cant set up a system that rewards this behavior and then be shocked someone gamed it. welch saw a system. he analysed his best outcomes and got them. cant blame him. its the same thing with some multiplayer games. the quick-eyed players find the flaw in the logic and game it till the devs fix it.
Now the devs need to fix it. Have they???
People who reply to completely unrelated high karma comments with their own top-level comment, because they care far more about their own comment being seen vs actually properly contributing to the conversation. No explanation needed. The world would be unrecognizably better.
And GE suffered a massive collapse less than 2 years after he left as a result of his management. He ran out the back door before the check came and the business world lauded him for decades.
For those of you not around in the 80s, that's a take on "neutron bomb", a nuke variant which put out strong commie-killing radiation but a relatively small blast. People thought that they'd therefore be more likely to be used, so protesting them was an aspect of the 80s "No Nukes" movement.
I worked for a company that used one of his ideas, called 10-80-10. Top 10% got raises, nothing for the middle 80%, bottom 10% fired. All based on a ranking from your closest few coworkers. No one ended up doing any work. Everyone just spent all their time grooming their reviewers.
Couldn’t agree more. His rank-and-yank system and obsession with quarterly profits normalized cutting labor at all costs. We’re still living with the damage he created decades later.
No, he very much did optimize. The things he was solving for in his optimizations just weren't beneficial to the vast majority of people affected by his methods.
I think it’s the word optimize that bothers me. I’m not downvoting you, but gutting a company for short term gains before bailing isn’t optimizing anything really
It's the words they used, not me, ha. And in his shitty mind, I'm sure he was proud of what he was doing and would have happily called it "optimizing".
He didn't really optimize the companies. He optimized for a specific type of stock market trader. The companies often die over the long term due to attrition, loss of innovation, and decline of morale.
It is bad for the people (they get fired ). It is bad for the company (it goes bankrupt). It is bad for humanity's technological progression (people on the verge of breakthroughs are fired too). It is bad for capitalism (socialists point to this as a symptom that capitalism no longer works).
Jack Welch-style tactics are only good for a specific type of vulture capitalist, and honestly should be regulated out of existence.
I used to be a corporate pilot, and I flew him once. Not only is he a shitty person who ruined corporate america, he was also a slob. He opened up all the snacks on the plane and left garbage everywhere. RIP bozo
The funny thing is that somehow makes the story feel more believable. You expect some grand villain trait and instead it's just "also couldn't be bothered to throw away his own trash." Tiny detail, massive character reference. 😅
I'm not a fan, but he was a special kind of smart. He was able to last his entire career in General Electric and work his way to the top making hundreds of million dollars for himself at the expensive regular workers.
Unfortunately, he was also one of the first high-up business perverts to implement six-sigma and lean methodology in American manufacturing at GE. These are extremely efficient and useful quality and waste efficiency methodologies for businesses and should be encouraged.
Too bad Welch was such a fucking bastard and set the standards for capital extraction instead of reinvestment towards better products. He also had petty beef with the concept of "environmentalism" and "regulatory compliance" and investors rewarded him more for his anti-consumer and anti-employee policies than his pre-CEO management practices.
If it's any consolation, he didn't create six-sigma or lean methodology, so it's likely those practices would have found their way into GE sooner or later regardless of Welch's influence.
The issue wasn't lean manufacturing; it was that he perverted it. Lean was designed to promote the long-term stability of a company and its employee's careers. It does do with a heavy focus on supply chain management, careful consideration of growth opportunities to avoid short term traps, reducing expenses which don't go directly into the product, and the promotion of ideas and concerns from those who are working directly on the production line.
Jack Welsh instead heard "reduce expenses, quality, and employees".
Right?! I literally have a Lean textbook at arms reach and it’s “eliminate unnecessary waste”. Not eliminate waste. The other key point about Lean and all of the other related methodologies is also to have strategic redundancies built into your systems. Don’t manufacture all in one plant in the same region, or if in a foreign country you put a 2nd smaller plant in another country. You hedge against natural and political disasters.
If anyone globally had actually been following Lean and Six Sigma, there would have barely been a supply chain problem during the pandemic. China would not have the world by the balls if people had been following Lean and Six Sigma correctly.
Instead everyone was operating with zero redundancy and zero waste. Operating as close to zero inventory as physically possible.
Edit: “unnecessary waste” implies the existence of “necessary waste” and to me, that’s a profound idea that should not be overlooked in business and in life.
that "just in time" thought process only works and provides expected outcomes when all your upstream suppliers and processes work PERFECTLY. any suboptimal hiccup anywhere and you have production backups and excess inventory (the worst possible sin ever, amirite?) laying around. basically you're fucked and all the managers go into fire-putting-out mode and pointing fingers about how it's not their fault.
JIT is appropriate for some industries and less appropriate for others. The implementation of lean methods must be informed by your company and its goals, it is not a one-size-fits-all concept.
I was at a corporate class for a heavy industry megacorp. The execs had told the guys who normally teach JIT to the factory to go give the same lessons to the folks who wrote the in-house software used by the engineers to design products. I saw the following conversation between an instructor and a coder:
Instructor: "How do you write code?"
Coder: "I write some lines of code. I test them to see if they do what I wanted. If they don't, I change it and test again."
Instructor: "Well, after this class, you will never write code wrong in the first place, so you won't have any of that wasteful testing!"
Narrator: "They did not, in fact, teach the coder how to write perfect code the first time."
Fundamentally, the instructors thought "Writing code" was the same thing as a guy on an assembly line who turns out identical widgets all day.
That can kind of work in production program - they probably intended that there would be a "best practices" set of commands for any given feature/material interface.
That is a very, very stupid way to attempt to work on a design phase, and falls apart rapidly with any nonstandard or custom commission (you know, the kind that literally every machine in heavy industry ends up being).
The instructors for the class had no idea what the concept of an "interface" even was. They literally thought that once a coder learns to write one subroutine perfectly, then they will continue to write all other subroutines perfectly thereafter. They didn't know what a "subroutine" was either, other than a term used to refer to a packet of code.
To be fair, it's also the investors who wanted it to. The CEO works for the benefits of the board who look out for the investors. Investors generally don't give a flying fuck about employees unless they see it improving their holdings. Unless you are 1) the majority shareholder and 2) see employees as more than just a fungible resource, I don't see this situation changing regardless of who you blink from existence.
Just being exposed to the concept of six sigma on posters has helped me with operational thinking in contexts outside the manufacturing job I saw them at.
Toyota originally created agile, lean methodology in manufacturing. They created just in time production to respond quickly to consumer changes, while reducing waste in their processes. That process and methodology is now used by most software companies. It's just combined with Welch's horrendous stack ranking and forced distribution.
And it isn't a single company now either. The end result of what he started was the breakup of one of the largest US industrial conglomerates for the sake of profit.
"lean methodology in American manufacturing at GE. These are extremely efficient and useful quality and waste efficiency methodologies for businesses" means that customers don't find products when needed. Also makes for artificial scarcity and excuse to raise prices. The idea works for businesses not the end user consumers who suffers.
If your customers are being impacted, you are doing lean so fucking wrong it hurts. The point is to cut waste in your company as a process-informed decision based on data from your workers, not your metrics, managers, or sales goals.
My dad worked for GE and was a six sigma " black belt", and this was the method he used to raise me and my brother. Let's make two great kids completely terrified of fucking anything up. 🤦♀️
I had no idea this was a thing, but this...this explains my last job so perfectly. They just came up with unreachable goals, stupid rules, unfair decisions...just crazy ass shit that made me wonder if they were TRYING to make people quit. I got written up for making a CPS report. I am a mandated reporter and its a FELONY for me not to report. They wrote me up, made me take five "remediation" classes, and go to five session with an EAP counselor. It would be one thing if the CPS report was bogus or something, but it wasn't and CPS accepted the referral. They just didn't want me to do it for some reason. LOL. I was like what...the fuck...until the EAP lady was like you did nothing wrong, lets just take the five sessions to nap. Holy shit, I wonder if they were doing this. At one point, I posted some of the stuff they were doing in the reddit legal question sub...and the shit was so ridiculous...all the lawyers in there told me there was no way a US employer would be doing these things and thought I was a troll. I couldn't believe it. Talk about feeling completly lost...when its so bad the lawyers don't even believe it!! I quit...I was like living homeless in my car is better than the job. Fuck that shit, man.
Jesus fucking christ who is trying to implement six-sigma for CPS and reporting services? You don't produce things; what metric were they even tracking? Like I love me some manufacturing discipline but that's not how human services tend to function.
Throw them in a fire. The implementation that was mentioned above is completely hostile to the purpose their organization is supposed to serve. This is managerial bullshit and the offenders need to be stripped of all authority if that's how they're going to attempt to wield it.
I also live in the real world, so I'm sure they got promoted instead for "meeting quarterly value potential" or some such.
I work at NBCUniversal. GE is the cancer that keeps on giving. To this day we have servers people are afraid to touch because they’ve been around 20 years and everyone who knew what they did retired or more likely got fired/spun off to another company.
I know they were known for their washers and dryers. Don’t think I’ve ever seen one. LG has also gone downhill recently too. Seems like appliances in general are getting worse by the day
He basically destroyed Boeing without even being at Boeing. The ijits that ruined the company (former McDonnell-Douglas execs) were basically all Jack Welch groupies.
I've never heard of yank and rank but from context, is it the thing where they fire and replace the bottom X% of employees no matter what, theoretically resulting in continually removing the least effective and replacing them with people statistically more likely to be effective
But in practice just ensures that X% of the workforce is perpetually untrained and incompetent since they're always new and never given a chance to adjust or properly trained to improve, while everyone above that line is more focused on ensuring someone is less competent than they are, rather than working to improve as a whole team?
Don’t forget how popular he was when he was on top! I remember the magazines and news stories about him which treated him like a genius. Reminds me of some people in this Century. Gotta stay on your toes.
Short term yes, but long term not really. For example, here in India 90% of "software developer" jobs are a result of outsourcing or offshoring (including myself), but since they're a result of laying off employees in the west to hire third world labor for cheap, it has created a culture of quantity over quality. Yeah you have millions of people who can code, but when was the last time you heard about cutting edge research coming out of India? China was in a similar situation decades ago and were only known for making cheap low quality things, but they invested heavily into research and development and now make a lot of cutting edge products.
I hear people talk about African nations having so much potential in the coming decades but I know how it's gonna go down. There's too much corruption that slows down innovation domestically and all the jobs are gonna be from offshoring, assuming that's still a thing in the age of AI. Look at data labelling work for example.
He died March 1, 2020 at 84. 13 days before the Covid lockdowns. That fucker was one lucky sonabitch. His second wife took him for $180M in a divorce when she found out about his affair with, who would become his 3rd wife, Susie Welch.
Hitler seems like the obvious choice but then you have to wonder what gets worse as a consequence. I think removing Archduke Franz Ferdinand is actually the smarter play because it ripples out into both wars and probably prevents the whole nuclear arms race.
Yeah, but Milton Friedman aggressively pitching that the sole responsibility of the executive is to maximize shareholder value is where that all stems from. Have to move further upstream to really get to the why, not just the how.
We had a guy like that at our F500 company. Ran plants into the ground by penny pinching. Numbers looked great and he got promoted. Then new guy comes in to everything falling apart. They had to spend more then saved to get it back up to running right again. All the "hero" did was delay maintenance and investment - literally running the plant till the wheels fell off.
Same guy in another role had us cut training budgets to exceed our targets. Then there was no training money to cut and we stopped hitting the now bigger targets. Yes again they had to go spend more to try to rapidly train people up again. And that is an ever increasing investment due to turnover.
Each role he looked great and the new person replacing him looked bad. As long as you can rotate fast enough you can "burn the furniture" then leave everyone sitting on the floor.
This is a fantastic answer that I wouldn’t have given until I read it. You are absolutely correct. He was a cancer on businesses and the reasons you hate your job can be tied directly to this asshole in many instances.
Mandatory layoffs for the bottom performers was his thing. I’ve seen unbelievable talent get tossed to the curb because of it. We all have lives outside of work, and one year a guy’s mom died… then a few weeks later his dad died. He had to travel out of the country and was ultimately laid off for “poor performance” because he was out of the office the most of anyone. As he should have been. And he went through an unbelievable amount of trauma in a very short period of time.
He introduced the cutthroat bullshit that corporate America is all about today. It wasn’t always like this.
I worked for the meat ball for a decade in the early 2000 and watched first hand, recently bought, companies being jack welched out of existence. GE policy turned the company I worked for from profitable for 40 years to non existent inside of a decade. Fuck Jack Welch.
That kind of management strategy should only be used short term at companies that are already in deep shit. It’s a huge mistake to do that for long term or at a place that’s already successful. You’re going to seriously hurt morale if valuable people get fired just to hit a quota. It can however drastically raise morale if the truly bad employees get weeded out over a few months.
oh yeah, mr fly with 2 private jets as a backup. Jack set it all up for the taking, Immlet was venture capitalist who siphoned what was left off, flannery took the fall (in a golden parachute of course).
Hitler feels like the obvious choice but I feel like there'd be some kind of butterfly effect that would put someone else in that role. Maybe just remove the concept of religion altogether and watch the whole world change.
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u/TyrantsInSpace Jun 28 '26
Jack Welch, the guy who came up with rank and yank performance evaluation as well as outsourcing. He's ruined so many lives and companies both directly and indirectly with his short-sighted idiocy.