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Comment by dayofthedaleks | Hacker News Reader

My impression is that he was no management genius but rather fortunate in the timing of moving his company into the FIRE sector. All of that goodwill evaporated in the 09 crisis.

Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions? I guess he also deserves the credit/blame for the ubiquity of Six Sigma.

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The first paragraph is basically how I'll always remember him. Stack ranking is a farce. He was incredibly fortunate, but insisted it was his ideas instead. It's the equivalent to a vice heavy person winning the lottery, then writing a book claiming that if you want to be rich, you need to smoke and drink daily, and the proof is that I'm rich.

The post hoc fallacy rears its head everywhere, if you look closely enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

Neutron Jack.

We can all thank him for pioneering stack ranking and Vitality curve performance management that called for firing of bottom 10 percent each year.

A Japanese head of company once said, "there's no point firing bottom 20 percent because given time, there will be new bottom 20 percent formed to take its place.

Is that an accurate quote? It would seem to make more sense if the first gerund was "firing" rather than the current "hiring"

Very, very few companies really want to hire the bottom 20% anyway.

oops, typo. Yes I meant 'firing', not 'hiring'. Fixed.

He was supposed to have created this company that cranks out highly capable managers in all eternity but somehow it didn’t work out. I read his book and already got a bad feeling about him. And from his latest TV interviews I got the impression that he was just a selfish prick that had learned nothing and gained zero wisdom in old age.

Obvious he was a very powerful and capable man but he used his powers only for his own gain and overall made a negative contribution.

I once described the worst member of senior leadership I've had to deal with at a company as having no tricks other than cosplaying as Jack Welch. Like he instituted stack ranking at a 50 engineer company because he was old money, and it never occurred to him to interact with "the help" enough to know the engineers under him.

He's one of two people in the management chain I've met in my career that they working at a company (not even in my management chain, but there at all) is mutually exclusive with me working there.

> Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions?

Inflicting "stack ranking" upon the world, for one.

Not all contributions are positive.

This. And if you pull if forward, stack ranking did a lot of damage to both GE and Microsoft after Ballmer implemented it.

The real failure of stack ranking is it never ends, so at some point you are firing good employees.

Not just that, but good employees get tired of dealing with the stress and sabotage from coworkers trying to stay ahead of the layoffs. In my experience, it speeds up the burnout process.

Also the list of "good" employees is not consistent year to year. Even if you don't fire people most will have better and worse years. Sometimes the swings can be dramatic when people find their groove or conversely when they face burnout or have personal problems.

Stack ranking is stupid, heartless and unscientific. Just like the man who invented it.

It in fact gets worse. During stack ranking's tenure at Microsoft, they would often pull the "best and brightest" in the entire company into teams to accomplish certain goals. The theoretical "best and brightest" were then stack-ranked against each other. Every manager had to pick the "worst" person to eventually get canned.

In my humble opinion stack ranking was meant to create a clear process by which to measure people relative to their roles and each other. (I'm not defending the practice, just stating purpose.) Instead it created selective pressure that measured how well you could game the process to appear successful and push down the ranking of everyone else for yourself and your employees.

During the stack ranking heyday there was a manager who spent his year compiling a list of mistakes by other teams. When it came to year end reviews anyone asking about the ranking of this manager's people ended up deflected with questions about their own team members. People learned to just leave this manager's rankings alone and work around him. He was wildly successful, getting promoted early and often before leaving the company to go start a recruiting firm which allegedly applies some sort of AI principles to picking good candidates.

Yes, the purpose was to measure the unmeasurable, which, since it's impossible by definition, created the secondary effects you describe.

For details on the daily workings of stack ranking at Microsoft, the venerated Mini Microsoft is still up and available in all it's 15 year old glory. It's one of the true documents of contemporary tech work, and I'm glad it isn't just buried in archive.org (long live archive.org).

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/

Go back to the first couple years and you'll be soaking in it.

> Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions?

The ideas of outsourcing your core businesses, of fire-selling everything you couldn't exploit (any business GE was not #1 or #2, regardless how profitable), and top to bottom accounting fraud.

I think he wrote the book all our dads said we were supposed to read.

Jack gave himself an endowed chair at the "Jack Welsh school of management", one more sign that people like that have no idea what legitimacy looks like since 2000 or so.

I think they pushed outsourcing hard under his reign. They were one of the companies responsible for destroying a lot of IT jobs in the US as a result. Not a good guy at all.

Every other F100 was outsourcing IT like crazy in the mid-2000s because of that Harvard Business Review article that talked about outsourcing everything non-essential to your primary business. Meanwhile, Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) thought that was a stupid idea because every business was being transformed by its IT and that it's a revenue multiplier, not a cost center (something that every other decent person in the rank and file of IT has believed since... ever). The whole "digital transformation" boom that swept the F100 in the past 10 years is essentially back-tracking on all these divestures and off-shoring efforts.

I recently got a subscription to the HBR and am surprised at how...misguided it is. It's shocking how this locus of low competency is destroying American business. Ditto on the outsourcing, too - left a job at a blue-chip American company because its culture had been internally rotted by outsourcing. (Of course, they were hilariously struggling to keep and retain the talent necessary to stay ahead of the tech curve, now institutionally recognizing they've made a massive mistake. Most good engineers had a tenure of 6 months.)

Pardon my ignorance on the topic, but why would moving a business into new areas be considered lucky?

I wouldn't consider Apple moving into phones as lucky. Would you?

It's just not what he pushes as the primary reason for his success.

They also were sitting on a ton of real estate (and invested capital from their pension fund), so the comparison with Apple isn't totally on point. Apple didn't get into the market because they already had a warehouse filled with phones.

If you saw Apple moving into phones and then moved your business into phones and your business did well, a person like Welch would call himself lucky.

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