David Gelles:As @petermrobison demonstrates,ultimate blame for the crashes lies w/highly paid execs

[BeckyDem]

Link to tweet

( Lessons learned....sort of. )

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. The gift of Jack Welch just keeps on giving.

Jack's business philosophy and his cult status with MBA's restructured US manufacturing in the 80s/90s. Along with "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, these two helped to destroy US manufacturing in this country. Thanks Al and Jack!

[BeckyDem]

3. Yep, that is truth.

[KT2000]

5. He turned businesses into

functioning psychopaths. More and more people are employed by those psychopaths now. In order to convert a successful business to his model, the intangibles had to be destroyed. Those include pride in their jobs, cooperation among departments, seriousness of purpose, and self-respect.

[OAITW r.2.0]

6. In the late 80's/early 90s I worked for a unit of General Signal (long since absorbed)...

Suddenly, we had to justify investments (tooling) in 8 months, instead of 2-3 years. Made it near impossible to buy new tooling with these payback demands. It's like they knew what they were doing. They wanted product, not infrastructure, to make final assy.

The VP/Corporate operations folks were all disciples of the Jack Welch Church/School of Shareholder Value.

[OAITW r.2.0]

7. And another thing....

"In order to convert a successful business to his model, the intangibles had to be destroyed."

I worked for almost 20 years at a manufacturing plant in Pittsfield, ME, building final alarm systems/smoke sensors and audible-visual signaling devices. IMHO, we were the best goddam, hotshit manufacturing company in that timeframe. We could bring a fully birthed, state-of-art product to market in an incredibly fast time-frame. I spearheaded an effort to insource plastic injection molding at our plant....to marry the plastics with PCBAs we produced inhouse. Thing was, we rented space to a private company that brought in brand new electric molding machines. I think we rented the space for $1.00. Our plant had plenty of space to give them. While we got some cost reduction on part costs what we really got were 3 critical things-

(1) Consoldiation of all of our tools that were shotgunned around New England through the Mid-West.
(2) "0" Cardboard packaging.
(3) Immediate production line feedback on quality issues. If there was a problem in manufacturing, we didn't have 12-16 weeks of inventory in the pipelkine to deal with it.

It probably added 15 years to the operational life in Pittsfield, but in the end, it wasn't enough to save us. A frigging crown jewel of US manufacturing that the accountants finally drove a stake in....

[FakeNoose]

8. You're so right and it started in the early 70's

He f*ed up General Electric in the 70's and then he went around telling everybody else how to do it in the 80's. That man was evil!

[OAITW r.2.0]

9. He made his stock-holders a lot of money.

He just fucked over the workers and their communities in the process. It was all about short-term performance (and books-cooking) at the expense of long-term smart growth.

[FakeNoose]

10. Yep!

I never worked for GE but I was married to a GE financial manager back in the 70s. We saw it happening in real-time, and it was sickening. I never admired Welch, he was like an early Mitt Romney.

[moondust]

2. Sounds like Sears.

Taken over by a hedge fund raider who likely didn't know anything or care about retail.

A combination of shortsightedness and corporate raidership were too much for even this iconic brand to overcome.

The man who raided Sears for its real estate riches

[BeckyDem]

4. Very sad. So many of us grew up with that store. It really was wonderful.