Both Welch and Immelt have spent time in their post-GE careers telling everyone who will listen that it was not their fault. The financial books were, to some extent, cooked. One of his lieutenants, Beth Comstock, apparently knew next to nothing about the production side of GE, but thought that the important thing was that GE tell a good story, whether tethered to reality or not, to its employees and to the public. Immelt was a positive thinker and a salesman. Immelt took with him enormous riches from GE, and yet left it floundering. The authors largely tell a story about Jeffrey Immelt, the successor to the famed manager Jack Welch, who took GE into the financialized capitalism of the late 20th century, which worked while it worked. Although I am grateful for the story the authors are able to tell, I cannot help but feel that there is a much longer and more interesting book under the surface. Since the fall of GE coincides with a decline in American fortunes generally, one feels that there ought to be a lesson here. What in the world happened to GE? Its fall from industrial stardom has been astonishing. Lights Out is an interesting and timely book. That tells you of the quality of its writing, and the importance of its content. Regardless, the book is so compelling that it led me to a physical and emotional response. The authors make fun of this corporate theme, but it is certainly true in my little corner of the company. I remember one time somebody telling me, "whatever you have heard about China is true, somewhere in China." Perhaps that can be rephrased to be, "whatever you've heard about GE is true somewhere in GE." the stories you won't hear in this book are the remarkable stories of imagination at work. If the story is even 50% true it is infuriating. but most of it is stuff I didn't even know was going on. some of them ring true as events I remember. in almost four decades at the company I have lived through the events described in this book. Then it occurred to me, I was listening to the story of what I had considered to be my home exposed as something quite different than what it really was. I found myself unexplainably stressed out in the week that I was listening to this book. Lights Out details how one of America's all-time great companies has been reduced to a cautionary tale for our times.Ī GE Middle Manager Enraged to Learn These Things In the end, GE's traditional win-at-all-costs driven culture seemed to lose its direction, which ultimately caused the company's decline on both a personal and organizational scale. Lights Out examines how Welch's handpicked successor, Jeff Immelt, tried to fix flaws in Welch's profit machine, while stumbling headlong into mistakes of his own. Yet, fewer than two decades later, the GE of old was gone. And after two decades of leadership under legendary CEO Jack Welch, GE entered the 21st century as America's most valuable corporation. GE electrified America, powering everything from lightbulbs to turbines, and became fully integrated into the American societal mindset as few companies ever had. For generations, it was job security, a solidly safe investment, and an elite business education for top managers. Since its founding in 1892, GE has been more than just a corporation. This is the definitive history of General Electric's epic decline, as told by the two Wall Street Journal reporters who covered its fall. How could General Electric-perhaps America's most iconic corporation-suffer such a swift and sudden fall from grace?
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