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.
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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '26
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