Unfathomably based. I'd much prefer these honest types who are upfront about it, that I don't like you, we don't like you either, it's all transactional here, work in exchange for money till we find a better job, than the sociopath corporate assassins who try to gaslight workers telling everyone how we're all family and we're all in this tough period together, meanwhile doing layoffs, cutting things like break room coffee while buying another Porsche and building an executive gym.
Many companies don't implode, because if all workers constantly ran away from all incompetent companies, everyone would have to choose to be unemployed, because there are no perfect companies where everyone is perfect and everything runs like clockwork. But some do implode when it reaches critical mass.
I think that Welch spawned a whole bunch of "Mini-Jacks," that worked to be what they thought he wanted.
The division was doing badly, and this guy was sent in to "clean it up."
I suspect that he ended up "cleaning it out," which was probably a win, in his book.
I worked with some top-shelf engineers, back then. GE could hire the best. If they had been managed well, they could have been awesome.
The management, however, was terrible, especially at the higher levels. Lots of nice suits and cufflinks, but very little smarts.
Employment is not a romantic relationship where mutual feelings are required, it's a transactional one. You don't need to like your CEO and the CEO doesn't need to like you.
You need to provide value for the company and the company has to pay you money in exchange, that's how it works. Two parties can monetarily prosper together while simultaneously disliking each other. Nations do it all the time, see China and the US, and business partners do it all the time, see the MythBusters and many more. The most successful business people are also the ones who are best at putting feelings and emotions aside of financial interest.
Gaslighting workers that a private company will have feelings or emotional attachment towards them will only result in disappointment for you, but it's a lesson many learn the hard way. They won't be by your deathbed, only your family will.
Do you want the harsh truth or the sweet lie? Because that GE exec at least told it to you straight like to an adult, hence my chapeau, even if it shatters your rosy belief. The world could use more like them, instead of the sociopaths who manipulate you to stick around while they're already planning for the group's crash in a year which is coincidently when their golden parachute stocks vest.
Makes me wonder how we'll look back at companies like Google in the future.
I can say “I don’t know how to do brain surgery and furthermore I have no interest to learn.” You may correctly determine I am being honest but this in no way qualifies me to do brain surgery.
Knowledge and experience matters. Welchian leadership aggressively and deliberately dismisses all knowledge as a cost to be minimized. The idea is you can make up for any organizational shortcoming if you just abuse people enough. It’s a very leaded pipe era way of thinking.
The disastrous results of this philosophy speak for themselves.
>>The management, however, was terrible, especially at the higher levels. Lots of nice suits and cufflinks, but very little smarts.
People being people, eventually corruption takes over all processes. This whole idea that one had to stack rank the bottom 20%, promote the top 20% and let the former eventually fire the middle performers depended on honesty from people running the processes.
>>The management, however, was terrible, especially at the higher levels. Lots of nice suits and cufflinks, but very little smarts.
All the best depending on mediocre people to promote smart people above them, heck even the smart people wouldn't promote people smarter people above them. What this means is the process in most companies that practiced this was fixed. Most managers promoted their lackeys, fired who ever was good(perceived as a threat to their own position), remainder was tolerated as long as they stayed inert. This now achieved the very opposite what the process was to achieve.
This should kill the company, and it often does, but most large companies have products and customers that take a while(years, to even decades) to go away. To that end, this could go on for ages until things reached their natural end.