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> Meanwhile, General Electric is in the process of splitting into three publicly traded companies, focused on health care, aerospace and energy.

For some context, GE is kind of riches-to-rags story. Check out this chart of the share price:

https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=NYSE%3AGE

Here's a company whose stock is trading at 1994 levels. It never recovered from the "dot-com" crash of 2001. The dividend yield is nowhere close to a US treasury at any maturity. It's losing money left and right. A good chunk of that was the pivot, under Jack Welch's leadership, from actually making stuff into financial services, shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs along the way. GE was therefore well-placed for full-impact during the GFC.

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What gets me is how Jack Welch was held up as an amazing businessman and model for corporate flexibility for years while his changes utterly destroyed GE's future for short-term gains. I'd argue the same thing about the Clinton administration and Greenspan specifically. There's got to be a better mechanism to force companies and countries to focus on long-term rather than short-term improvements.

> There's got to be a better mechanism to force companies and countries to focus on long-term rather than short-term improvements.

Unions with a board seat. Employee ownership. Shares in the hands of pragmatic investors who value long term over extraction and dumping the carcass on the next fool. People like Welch and characters like Gordon Gecko aren’t heroes, they’re cautionary tales, the Frank Underwoods (House of Cards) of finance and corporate management.

I'd say he was the original LinkedIn style Thought Leader CEO. His statements and performance was never critically analyzed by mainstream media when he was at top job for decades.

In case anyone thinks it is past now. There is army of nincompoops who idolize him even today.

Stack ranking was his baby, too.

Is that the same thing as 'rank and yank'?

Yes

Also known as playing double tennis against the people across the net along playing against the person besides you. Insane philosophy.

> I'd argue the same thing about the Clinton administration and Greenspan specifically.

I'm curious, what are the things that happened during the Clinton administration that you think were short-term gains at the expense of long-term improvements? I've always felt that many of the fiscal policies of Clinton were in favor of long-term stability (e.g. specifically his tax policies and balancing the budget).

Now, with monetary policy and Greenspan specifically, I 100% agree that the "Greenspan put" was absolutely a disaster for long-term stability, but Greenspan was in office from 1987 - 2006 (originally nominated by Reagan), so I see his choices as pretty orthogonal to whoever was president at the time.

Here is an interesting article outlining some specific Clinton-era laws that were an enormous help to private equity: https://prospect.org/economy/cut-off-private-equitys-money-s...

There used to be strict leverage restrictions on funds that raised money from investors, as well as limits on who/what entities could invest in the funds. The article really goes into more detail but lawmakers and the Clinton administration eliminated these laws and birthed the modern private equity industry which is pretty much the definition of short term focus.

Some people pin the repeal of Glass–Steagall (99) as a source of what happened in 08.

> fiscal policies of Clinton were in favor of long-term stability (e.g. specifically his tax policies and balancing the budget)

Of special note, the two BRAC rounds that were conducted under his presidency (93, 95), as well as one under H.W. Bush (91) and one under Reagan (88), substantially reduced the number of extraneous, pork barrel military bases across the US.

The 1988-2001 US defense budget decreases made a lot of hard and politically unpalatable choices that were fiscally responsible.

And since the US budget is ~15% DOD, that addressed a big chunk.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_Realignment_and_Closure

> I'm curious, what are the things that happened during the Clinton administration that you think were short-term gains at the expense of long-term improvements?

The dot com bubble forming and then popping is a notable one, Enron's fraudulent ascent is another.

> The dot com bubble forming and then popping is a notable one, Enron's fraudulent ascent is another.

While I agree with this, I interpreted the parent comment as saying there was something specific about the Clinton administration's policies that led to short term thinking. New technology boom and busts have been going on since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (just look at early railroads and auto companies); the dot com bubble had nothing specifically to do with Clinton. Similarly, WTF did Enron have to do with the Clinton administration?

> the dot com bubble had nothing specifically to do with Clinton. Similarly, WTF did Enron have to do with the Clinton administration

Who is responsible for allowing these things to happen if not the President at the time? Sure, there are limitations to executive power but far more leeway in raising the alarm via the bully pulpit and plenty of scope for using the investigation and regulatory powers that did exist and it would have been a great opportunity for spending political capital to act or at least try. I’m not aware of any evidence of any of that being done and the notion that Clinton couldn’t have known or couldn’t have done anything at all about it is ridiculous. Therefore it’s the implicit Clinton policy of neglect or inaction which is where the culpability lies. I’m happy to be proven wrong and I’m not blaming Clinton alone or even primarily but he deserves plenty of blame nonetheless.

> Who is responsible for allowing these things to happen if not the President at the time?

The President is not God, or a king. People seem to be confused about the role and powers of the President in our system. What, exactly, do you wish the President had said on his bully pulpit about Enron??

I always find it bizarre that people blame the President for everything that happened on his watch, just as much as I think it bizarre that they give him all the credit. I mean, I generally think Clinton was a good president, but he also had much more than his fair share of luck in presiding during a booming economy (which would have boomed no matter who was president at that time).

> The President is not God, or a king.

Keeping Presidents accountable doesn't mean expecting Godlike powers.

> The dot com bubble forming and then popping is a notable one, Enron's fraudulent ascent is another.

Let's not forget WorldCom and Arthur Anderson, who later formed Deloitte if I'm not mistaken. We have them to thank in part for SOX and SOC audits as well as the PCAOB.

> There's got to be a better mechanism to force companies

I'd say the current version isn't terrible. Competition has lead to creative destruction. What would be real failure is GE sticking around with a bunch of moribund initiatives tying up skilled individuals and resources. Spinning out divisions is bad for GE shareholders (when the whole thing collapses) ... but I'm not sure it was actually bad for country, or for employees of new companies, or innovation in general.

Things sorta worked they way they are supposed to. Bad management decisions over time results in bankrupt companies and their resources being auctioned off to more efficient corporations.

@geodel posted Gates' review of "Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric" below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33114049

Had a conversation with a financial professional just after Jack Welched announced his retirement.

The thinking was that GE was screwed. Welch had been in power too long and made too many changes. There was no obvious leader. And GE had very much become Jack Welch Inc.

At least they were less inclined to double speak; in Greenspan’s day they wrote about their goal to fuck the worker bees: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...

Jack Welch was CEO of a different era. Remember when GE owned NBCUniversal? No? That was also under Welch. The WSJ lays some of the blame of GE's downfall at the feet of his successor, Jeff Immelt.

> GE’s precipitous fall, following years of treading water while the overall economy grew, was exacerbated, some insiders say, by what they call “success theater.” Mr. Immelt and his top deputies projected an optimism about GE’s business and its future that didn’t always match the reality of its operations or its markets, according to more than a dozen current and former executives, investors and people close to the company. [0]

Jack Welch didn't always make great decisions -- diversifying away from GE's core businesses into financial markets, media, etc. His last act of trying to acquire Honeywell failed. But it was Immelt who brought the company down. Immelt grew GE Capital from 40 to 55% of the company at the onset of the Great Recession, took government bailout money when it tanked, then divested it from the company when it was clearly a drag on profitability. He championed GE Digital which never materialized, and then made big bets on conventional energy just when renewables were taking off. I don't know if it could have been different in someone else's hands. But a little more truth-telling would probably have helped. Welch did think that appointing Immelt was his "biggest mistake" [1].

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-jeffrey-immelts-success-the...

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-welch-one-regret-general...

> Welch did think that appointing Immelt was his "biggest mistake"

It is because Jeff did not (or not allowed) to continue with scammy accounting practices encouraged by Jack Welch to keep stock price and earning per share high.

> Jack Welch didn't always make great decisions

Big, if true.

So basically Six Sigma will now be split into 3 Two Sigmas

There was a recent book about Jack Welch : The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59366216-the-man-who-bro...

Thank you. I will not miss to read this one. Last year I read https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Lights-Out

One of my favorite radio shows / podcasts (Fresh Air) interviewed the author of "The Man Who Broke Capitalism" back in June: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/31/1102165413/did-jack-welch-bre...

Factoid: Of the ten largest companies in America before the Great Depression, only GE was still in business after the Depression.

A quick google search tells me this is false. Everyone of of those companies was certainly in business after the depression, most are today

Company 1929 Revenues

Standard Oil (New Jersey) $1,523 (SO NJ > Exxon > merged with Mobil Oil to form ExxonMobil)

General Motors $1,504 (Reorganized in 2008, Still in Business)

Ford Motor $1,143 (Privately held until 50's Still in Business)

US Steel $1,097 (Still in Business)

Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea $1,054 (Out of Business 2015)

Swift & Co. $1,000 (Still in Business, Acquired by JBS SA in 2017 to form JBS USA)

Armour & Co. $1,000 (Bought by Greyhound in 1970, divested many ways, impractical to explain without a diagram - probably counts as out of business)

Standard Oil (Indiana) $495 (Amoco > Acquired by BP)

Sears, Roebuck $444 (Alive? maybe a zombie business)

General Electric $415

[Factoid] was coined in 1973 by American writer Norman Mailer to mean a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid

I guess he used it correctly ;-)

Seems dubious based on this: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/58635/what-were-...

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