GE was a weird company with a professional management class that were sort of like military officers. They were lifers and would travel around the country to run factories or whatever. You lived in your little GE town, and the location and size of your house was based in your corporate stature. You may be a plant manager building turbines in upstate ny, and then be promoted to some new role making washing machines in Kentucky.
The problem, like the military, it that it creates an insular and sort of incestuous culture that is hard to control centrally. It was similar to IBM in some ways. Alot of the “genius” of Jack Welch was reverse engineered as some visionary nonsense but was really about killing the old GE hierarchy.
It's passive aggressive power play all the way down.
While aiming to be at the top 1 - 2 of the stack is always a nice thing to do. Shutting down established revenue streams to achieve it is equally bad. In many ways it is also lazy. If you won't work on a business to make it the top 1 - 2, you just shut it down. That says better people need to be CEO, especially for a conglomerate like GE.
You are supposed to make money by expanding existing businesses, not by tuning the knobs and dials of the existing ones.
He didn't seem to realize that he most likely killed his marriage with that attitude. He was winning while losing.
So far each component they’ve taken on has set new expectations unseen in consumer banking.
Notably privacy of purchase history and shared credit history between couples who share a credit card.
I'd say its a lot of responsibility to get right, but not necessarily dangerous. And fwiw, I've seen old, established banks make reports that are objectively incorrect but then do everything possible to avoid fixing it.
On something like this, though, I'm glad you were able to get an email routed down from TC. I had multiple instances of this with matters addressed to Bezos but never with Apple.
If I was a hedge fund manager I would do a fund where we go long all companies that have a [ceoName]@[company.com] and short all companies that don't. In my experience the former have crushed it (apple and amzn being 2 obvious ones) and vice versa.
Just for context for those who aren’t in the US travel reward credit cards game, between churning (https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/what-is-credit-c...) and earning based on spend is a great way to get free trips and hotels.
That being said, the Apple Card is meh in every way and far inferior to Amex as far as customer service, the application user experience, rewards, etc.
The Apple Card is just a cobranded Goldman Sachs card. It’s the opposite of when Apple is at its best - when it owns the entire experience.
Amex owns the credit card, the processing network, and doesn’t do but one or two deals with outside banks. The perks from being in the Amex ecosystem are vast. Once you have one card with Amex, they don’t even do a hard credit pull most of the time.