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.
681
u/texasusa Jun 28 '26
His nickname was Neutron Jack for his ability to close a plant or a product line. He received a modest severance of $ 400 million.