Today, there isn’t anyone in the world who hasn’t heard of the brand General Electric. I first noticed it in the 70s when I saw it in neon lights on top of a building in Jeddah. The GE logo can be seen on everything (-) including jet engines, ultrasound scanners, wind turbines, televisions, commercial loan agreements, clock radios, toasters, nuclear reactors, light bulbs, safety systems, silicon tubes, locomotives and washing machines and etc. I witnessed this once again when I saw a transport truck with the GE logo on a highway in the Netherlands, I was stunned, were they doing ground shipment in Europe? However, since its establishment in 1892, General Electric has been more than just a company for Americans’ and the American Government. Known as a good employer for hundreds of thousands of employees and a safe investment tool for its shareholders for decades, GE’s trained technical workers have also become millionaires thanks to stock options. It was an elite training school for its executives and for others an enormous (1billion dollar) source of personal wealth.(+) GE has achieved something few companies can do, reaching the equivalent of government credit and trust source for the American society.
GE combines Thomas Edison’s Workshop with JP Morgan’s financial strength to support the country’s middle class, military, and economic power; it has an important place in modern American history. Yet, is all this still valid today? WhenI read the book Lights Out: Pride, Delusion and The Fall of General Electric, I realized our saying “don’t question what you are, instead, question what you will become” is very accurate. Imagine that 25years ago, GE shares were around 100USD and by 2017 they decreased to 7USD after GE’s legendary CEO Jack Welch’s and his successor, Jeff Immelt’s departure in 2017 and GE’s market value declined by 140billion dollars. In 2000, the company was valued at $600 billion, and now it is not even considered one of the most valuable companies in the USA. The book includes the events and interpretations that culminated in this result. The authors of the book are two Wall Street reporters, Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann.
At the end of the book, the authors state that GE is still a conservative and very hierarchical company, not open to the outside, especially to journalistic inquiry.(-) The book is based on six years of interviews conducted by the authors, comparing the information given during those interviews with official publicly available records. The names of those who did not want to be named have been changed. Frankly, I had doubts about the book, when I saw that the management style and actions of Jack Welch, the famous legendary CEO of the time, who left the CEO in 2000 was portrayed as the cause of GE’s failure; however, after reading Bill Gates’ “What Happened to GE?” book review, I accepted the work as more reliable. (https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Lights-Out )
The book begins like this:
“The company is no longer the media’s darling or an analyst favorite, its shares are no longer counted in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the once-generous dividend distributing company is nearly disappeared. A share of GE stock was once an essential component of the beginner investor’s portfolio but is now perceived as a speculative stock…
GE’s fall was very rapid. Thousands of employees lost their jobs. The collapse of a company that taught generations of American businesses what it meant to manage well raises a major question, one that is still unanswered. Just how much of the success of the many other companies that have chased and emulated GE was real?”
General Electric carries the torch of legendary inventor Thomas Edison. But Edison’s relationship with GE was short lived; the father of the General Electric Company was JP Morgan, not Thomas Edison. Edison served on the company’s board of directors for a short time. Edison sold his last GE shares a few years after the company’s establishment to fund failed mining experiments and thus missed out on rapid growth.
The first signs of trouble were barely visible when General Electric was experiencing its greatest, wildest successes, led by Jack Welch, a hard-hitting Irishman from Massachusetts who was then regarded as the most extraordinary business executive of his generation.
The most influential CEO of the 21st century, Welch was an ambitious elementary school student who, after graduating from high school, went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to study chemical engineering, earning master’s and doctorate degrees in the same field from the University of Illinois; he was not interested in an academic career; he was determined to become famous and make money. In 1960 Jack Welch was hired by the Plastics division of the General Electric Company. Despite battling stubborn stuttering since childhood, he brought “machismo” (-) into the corporate world. For Welch, the world was divided between winners and others, and “challenging” was his normal behavior.
In two decades, as he climbed the corporate ladder of GE, Welch’s genius leadership went unnoticed. Welch was not on the list of possible successors made by then CEO Reginald Jones in the late 1970s. However, Jones was later impressed by Welch’s strategic planning ability and him not being a typical GE person and thus Jack Welch was named the ninth chief executive officer in GE history. The book describes the initial situation as follows:
“Welch was intent on eliminating bureaucracy in order to reduce excess costs. Welch was implementing and expounding the corporate philosophies that would define the 1980s and ’90s and make him a corporate celebrity. Welch’s core mission was to attack complexity, ripping out layers of bureaucracy that had built up inside the company and making the massive company more nimble. Welch would do his best to kill anything that slowed GE down.
Strategy meetings and reviews in the pre-Welch years were structured, daylong affairs, dominated by huge binders and projections for the next two decades, one GE executive recalled. Welch saw these as hopelessly lumbering exercises in a fast changing economy that required constant updating, refining and shifting the portfolio of businesses, products and people. Executives like Jones had seen five year plans for industrial businesses as conservative and essential planning tools, given the amount of investment required to develop new products and bring them to market. Welch called them bullshit.
Welch shunned the extensive planning and shrank the team. He pushed decision making down to the individual businesses but kept a sharp eye on the specifics of each operation. He pushed middle managers to stop writing long memos and to lose their thick planning books. “I don’t want planning. I want plans,” he would say. Welch’s defenders said that he had an uncanny ability to marshal detailed information from deep within GE’s business lines, even as he kept an eye on the larger forces that were changing the face of global business, like outsourcing, trade policy, and the rise of Japan.
Executive teams were tasked with finding and removing layers of management. During one visit to the GE Aviation facility in Lynn, Massachusetts, Welch chatted with workers in the plant’s boiler room. He learned that the boiler room operation was supervised by four layers of management, a shocking discovery. That was just the sort of complexity that Welch was determined to carve out of the company. He proselytized the new GE religion: every business should be either first or second among its competitors.” (+)
Welch then sells large businesses at the heart of GE’s history. The era of GE selling TVs and toasters is put to an end. Later he purchases RCA Corporation, the owner of NBC, in 1986 for 6.5billion dollars and enters into new areas with an aggressive form of profit seeking.( -)
By 1985 Welch had spent more than $8 billion to overhaul factories which are older than 5 years for robotics and automation. (+) He also had a hand in the financial services unit, then known as “GE Credit Corporation,” a significant source of profit. By 1985, financial services accounted for one-sixth of GE’s annual profits. GE’s lending operation was as large as some of the largest financial services companies in the USA. At its peak, GE Capital generated more than half of GE’s total profits. GE, which entered the financial sector, was criticized by analysts, economy reporters, and investment bloggers for the loans given to its own companies and the inability to calculate the risks. This troubled the next CE0 Jeff Immelt. America’s most famous industrial corporation has become one of the largest and most mysterious banks in the USA. GE had begun to be perceived as a finance company instead of a giant industrial company and still could not improve its image despite all the communication. Easy money in financial markets overshadowed manufacturing and sales success and the stock price was depressed.(-)
According to Welch and his associates, the proof of the success of their method was in the numbers. However, the price for the victory was paid with a large number of employees losing their jobs. Welch cut jobs and workers wherever possible, creating tension at a company that many workers assumed they would retire from. In the 1980s, he reduced more than 100,000, or a quarter of the entire General Electric workforce and moved tens of thousands of jobs overseas, where unions were absent and labor was cheap.
Another famous and controversial tactic is called “rank and yank.” Welch would force managers to rank their employees’ performance for that year and the bottom 10% would be notified and let go if they couldn’t improve. The constant pressure of this type of tactic increased employee tensions.(-) Rank-and-yank worked well for GE’s performance. However, after some managers and some competent employees entered the 10% themselves, they did not find it useful. It was getting harder and harder to be a team in a place where everyone was trying to beat each other.(-) For example, a manager turned the system upside down by placing someone else in the bottom 10% to save another employee as a remedy. Welch argued that the company’s competitive advantage depends on its workforce and keeping performance at the same level is a never-ending struggle. For this reason, he made it a principle that his managers should be either first or second in the sector!
Welch was a good educator, a good “coach”; but had he neglected the governance rules that would offer support while establishing corporate governance principles? Perhaps GE was now a very intricate, diverse and complex institution. (-)
From 1980 to 2000, while GE’s earnings rose from $1.5billion to $12.7billion, its revenue increased more than fivefold to $129.9billion, and the stock price rose more than 40 times. GE succeeded in a world where its peers couldn’t survive. At GE, the most important thing was the stock price. CEOs and top executives also made money from their own GE shares when the company’s stock rose. Of course, the next CEO, Jeff Immelt, knew that GE had achieved this success by doing some accounting tricks, focusing on managing the stock and he went along the same path. The legally permitted buying/selling of their own stock was also one of GE’s most common practices.(-) Giant conglomerates like GE’s historical rival, Westinghouse Corporation, were disappearing and others like AT&T were under siege by increased competition or government regulation.
While Jeff Immelt was advancing in his career in the GE Plastics division in the late 1980s, he was looking for an opportunity for promotion. As Japanese competition began to erode GE’s dominant position in the white goods market, GE executives looked for a new part for their refrigerator compressors. With this new part, GE had replaced the traditional piston driven unit with a revolving design that would reduce energy consumption and save customers money as the imported models claim, while also freeing up more space inside the refrigerator. This invention was a revolution, but after a while, the compressors started to fail. Their engineers said that two-thirds of the refrigerators they sold would fail within a year and a half. But who was going to tell this to Welch? Then they changed the numbers.(-) The new graph of the fault data showed that the faults were not likely to reach critical mass until most refrigerators were out of warranty. But it didn’t work. Discovering the problem, Welch fired his entire home appliance team.(+) Welch had an ambitious manager to fix the problem: Jeff Immelt. Immelt managed several hundred sales and marketers at GE Plastics. At Welch’s behest, Immelt moved to Louisville, the site of GE’s massive Appliance Park factories and settled the matter. Immelt was in Welch’s good books to be the next CEO. As a reward, Immelt was promoted to a new role running all the America operation at GE Plastics, a $6billion business.
Immelt graduated in 1978 with degrees in applied mathematics and economics. Like many beginner executives at the time, he went to work at consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, where he shared an office with future Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Immelt’s next stop was Harvard Business School, and after graduating in 1982, Immelt intended to follow in his father’s footsteps and work for GE. It was a guaranteed choice. GE has provided a good and sustained career for its employees. The pay and benefits were so good that some workers called it “generous electricity.” Unfortunately, when Immelt took over the Plastics operation, the previous management had not done the right things; they played with the numbers to pretend that they had met their targets. Now he was faced with a dilemma: if he wanted to stay at GE, he had to play by the rules.(-) For a GE executive, the increase in sales and profit figures he is going to commit to achieve in the upcoming quarter or year, was more important than financial projections.
There is no scientific rule for choosing the CEO of a company. In GE, the CEO also serves as a Chairman, which results in having more influence over decisions. Bad decisions and faulty strategies can also be supported in such a corporate culture.
When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, it was clear that it would hit General Electric hard as well. GE Insurance had a substantial share of drafts for the destroyed buildings. On the other hand, the first recession in the economy in ten years had started, and this was putting pressure on GE; the attacks would worsen the recession. Meanwhile, stocks were falling. This situation brought thousands of questions to mind. There were vexing questions as to whether GE stock was driven by creative accounting games rather than Welch’s genius. Now it was up to Jeff Immelt to express such concerns. Like his predecessor, Immelt had demonstrated his ability to melt away criticism and unsolicited questions.(-) Immelt quickly adapted to the club of a handful of mostly male CEOs who run the world’s largest companies. He was able to manage crises without going into details and sought success, using his team aggressively only to stretch GE’s management goals and achieve higher goals.(+) That was GE’s way.
Real estate purchases that had begun in the Welch era did not stop when Immelt took over. (-) Managing financial results in this way was not Immelt’s invention. GE executives were working to make sure earnings were growing on a nice, smooth trajectory at all times. former CFO Dennis Dammerman, one of Welch’s most important executives; said “We’re a very complex, diverse company that no one from the outside looking in can reasonably be expected to understand in complete detail. We do not have one story for the investing world, we have a lot of diverse businesses and when you put them all together, they produce consistent, reliable earnings growth.”(+,-)
For this to be achieved, performance targets and the method of reaching them were first determined. Inorganic growth through continuous acquisition was the source of increased earnings. GE could use the unusually high price/earnings ratio for an industrial company as a high value currency to pay in other deals. By acquiring companies with a lower P/E ratio, GE was getting automatic earnings growth. To ensure to appear to have further profitability after these purchases, accounting principles were distorted.(-) These principles were not of course only distorted by GE. One of America’s largest companies, Enron, also resorted to similar tricks and now was exploding. GE was not an Enron, but it was not possible to say that it followed the principles of transparency, It was mysterious. GE was a black box with strong and consistent results. The company was pretending to have a stash of cash used to hide poor performance. While GE was not transparent to investors, it largely adhered to accounting and management principles in practice.
The world that Jeff Immelt thought he would lead GE was turned upside down. The recession and uncertainty that followed the terrorist attacks had dampened the global growth on which GE’s industrial businesses depended and changes in accounting rules in the wake of the Enron scandal … the company’s current balance sheet at GE Capital was supposed to convince investors that GE was not Enron.
The holding had a performance oriented and hierarchical management structure. Managers were expected to meet targets at the end of each quarter and everyone was making the necessary effort to meet Wall Street expectations. If the targets were not met in a quarter, some asset could be sold to make a quick profit.(+,-) For example a real estate, an airplane or any other asset within GE holdings.
GE employees said that their tricks were legitimate under accounting rules and had been approved by independent auditors from KPMG. In 2007 the Boston Securities and Exchange Commission office reported that it had opened an investigation into GE. GE’s long-term lending by paying high interest on short-term bonds to raise cash, on the other hand, caused the funding source and the loan to have mismatched maturities.(-) Changes in interest rates could put future GE profits at risk. Therefore, they “hedged” this situation by using derivatives. GE had failed to comply with SEC rules and according to the investigation, tried to cover up its non-compliance to avoid a $200 million fine. KPMG auditors working at the company allegedly signed off on inappropriate transactions without the approval of superiors in the national office. GE was managed under cover of incomprehensible complexity. For some, the investigation was evidence of abuse that allowed GE’s greatness and reputation to be easily swept under the rug.
The SEC investigation would look at historical records to see if the company’s accounting over the years had been misleading. All GE could do was cooperate and answer questions. As a result, GE’s practices were deemed suspicious, demonstrating its ability to manipulate and ignore the accounting practices required by all public companies to protect investors.
In dealing with financial services and loans almost destroyed GE’s past and its future.(-) To realize their vision of growth, Immelt felt that he had to optimize the long-term GE portfolio. When GE’s 2008 First Quarter results have been announced, the company failed to meet its targets. This was pretty bad. Some peple assumed that the reports were somehow wrong, but they weren’t. GE boasted that it knew the markets better than others and wouldn’t be in any trouble for its mastery of risk management. Now, however, he was in the same boat as all other financial institutions, unable to maneuver in time. GE shareholders went on sale. The stock saw its worst drop in recent years and its market value dropped by $50 billion that day and continued that way. Analysts no longer trusted GE. They were constantly skeptical, even JP Morgan analysts … An analyst noted that GE Capital’s tax rate was unexpectedly low. 14% compared to the 17% to 19% the company had previously predicted. The analyst, who announced a bombshell that shocked investors, made GE’s rating drop to neutral. In other words, GE top executives demanded success at all costs, and problems were hidden to preserve performance, so later on, small problems became big problems. As GE was protected by official institutions, its media power was also distracting, the authors claimed.(-)
Meanwhile, Merrill Lynch was sold, and Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy. GE was not Lehman Brothers. It would not fail or have to declare bankruptcy. Because of the size of the military business, the government wouldn’t let GE go under. GE’s lines of business healthcare, jet engines, power turbines, and media were all seen as solid businesses in the future of America and the world. GE had real businesses with real assets, real customers and was generating cash. But still GE was in trouble because these meant nothing to investors. GE has announced that it will no longer report quarterly earnings estimates. The stock continued its decline as the financial crisis continued. Immelt had to cut its quarterly dividend from 31cents to 10cents after 70years. Immelt would say in the future that, that day was his worst day at work. This cut would not only affect investors, but also reduce the number of quarterly checks issued to working shareholders and retirees.
S&P downgraded GE and Moody’s did the same. No matter what GE did, it could not provide confidence that it would generate cash from its core businesses in the future. Immelt was generally famous for his instinctive decisions just like Welch before him. Ostensibly, Immelt was appreciated for GE’s management during the crisis. But he left the Board of Directors in the background when making decisions. As both CEO and Chairman of the Board, Immelt did not seek continued advice or approval, instead, he wanted the board to trust, support and act quickly. On the other hand, didn’t Immelt know that the main reason companies have independent boards of directors is to protect the investors who choose them by managing the risks they are exposed to.
Of course, GE was kept in the safe zone with the help of the federal government and that came with a price. More than two and a half years later, the Securities and Exchange Commission has completed its investigation into GE’s accounting practices. The company had exaggerated its earnings by hundreds of millions of dollars and had bent accounting rules to the breaking point. For their sins, GE agreed to pay a $50 million fine and actually promised not to misbehave again. Considering what the company did, this fine was pretty low. The punishment confirmed long standing suspicions of the accounting games that had been going on within the company.(-) The two thousand page long legislation that was signed by Obama in 2010 changed everything from the risky strategies of big financial firms to credit cards and mortgages. Even though GE was not a bank, it would now be like any other company supervised by federal agencies. Companies that had been trading on the stock market for years with their speculative values were now subject to the Consumer Protection Rules.
In late September 2010, GE and the Environmental Protection Agency started a long and dramatic fight that goes back decades over who was responsible for cleaning up toxic waste in New York’s Hudson River. A pair of GE Plants had pumped more than a million pounds of toxic compounds into the river over generations, turning one of the most famous and vital American waterways into a two-hundred-mile-long toxic dump. Over the years, GE had ignored the threat to human life while mixing the waste of everything it produced into the rivers, seas, and soil.(-) Welch had justified himself on his own conscience, whereas everyone else was against him. Welch did not hesitate to make statements based on the contributions of his industrial investments to human life. Immelt similarly did not want to pay for what GE had done and spend millions of dollars cleaning up the environment. According to them, these were a natural result of the added value of industrialization and mechanization. For this reason, although many environmental measures were taken under Immelt’s management, he made campaigns to exonerate himself under the name of “Ecomagination,” turning to products that would reduce carbon emissions and said that he would spend billions of dollars, this was not found convincing at all by the activists. Forbes described part of the “Ecomagination” campaign as “showmanship” in its article titled “GE is going green”. “In essence, it’s a way to sell more products and services,” Immelt told Forbes. GE paid fines of up to $500 million for polluting Hudson.
GE needed to reinvent itself. GE never stopped improving its deteriorated image.(+) It didn’t want to be an industrial dinosaur, it wanted to stay young. GE was interested in software development and some exciting concepts of the West Coast technology culture through initiatives seeking to integrate traditional manufacturing operations.(+) GE might be old, but it was not a tired manufacturing company that only produces industrial components. It was renewing and constantly updating itself.(+) It was changing the world like technology companies. It had big data, made up of millions of records produced by machine sensors. “Engineers have to accept that technology isn’t everything. Maybe they should work with a marketer to understand customer needs,” they said. GE was still trying to convince the market that it was not a financial services company but rather a digital industrial giant.
However, Immelt kept making mistakes. In 2012 he acquired French Alstom, which competes with GE in the power turbine business and also makes passenger trains. Yet GE analysts said Alstom’s accounting records were inflated.
In 2013, GE announced that it would sell a profitable portion of GE Capital to convince analysts and the public of its seriousness.
Immelt was still pursuing a major industrial acquisition. Even Immelt’s oil and gas acquisitions could not convince the market that GE would abandon its dependence on the financial sector. GE’s reorientation of its industrial businesses to areas where the global economy could soon begin to grow again also had little effect on the stock price. Whatever Immelt did, the market did not trust GE. Finding a way out of GE Capital was the only way out of the stock market fear that plagued Immelt. The newly appointed former CFO of GE Capital quickly saw that the company’s growing operations around the world were full of disorganization, duplication, waste, inefficiency, and complexity.(-) He transitioned GE to lean management in 2013.(+)
The press and analysts were told this wasn’t just about cost savings. Duplicate functions in foreign countries had been removed. The operation had been optimized. Low profit businesses were exited. Shared support offices were established for small operations abroad. GE sought to be a consumer and market oriented company rather than just a bookkeeping business. The only task of all top managers now was to make sales. Industry giant GE was undergoing a major shift to adapt to the software and cloud economy.(+) However, there was resistance to innovation.(-)
It was widely accepted that the Welch era when GE stock peaked would no longer return. In the never ending comparison contest between Jack and Jeff, Immelt was always at the bottom. Immelt was spreading the story that GE was as innovative a company like Tesla Motors.
In March 2016, Bloomberg Businessweek came out with the headline: “How GE exorcised the ghost of Jack Welch to become a 124year old start up.”
For several years the digital was the subject of all the company’s public statements. Corporate Communications was announcing GE as the world’s first “digital/industrial” company. But GE’s plan to move quickly, build a viable product and then perfect it in the field was partially aborted due to the enormity of efforts.
At that time, even large corporations were becoming the target of activist shareholders. Activist firms were using their stakes to topple their boards and force strategy changes. Trian was one of the largest activist fund companies in the market. Trian had invested $2.5billion in GE. One year after the Trian investment, GE fell short of its financial targets. In the fall of 2016, the fund was impatient, seeking Board membership. GE continued to buy back its own stock, spending more than $3billion in the first four months of 2017.
Jeff Immelt realized that investors, especially Trian, had lost their trust. He had set a goal for a new CEO to take over in late 2017 and identified four GE members as possible successors. Flannery, with his economic knowledge and mathematical acumen was a strong candidate to become the new CEO and he was selected. In 2001, Immelt took over a ship that was in trouble but had not yet sunk. What many analysts and investors failed to see is that General Electric was in shambles, with dishonesty, lack of control and similar problems. It is a mistake to focus on the negative return on the stock during Immelt’s 17year term and compare it to the 60fold return over Welch’s 20year period. This book is a must read to see the dangers of obsessively focusing on attracting investors.
Welch is said to be a great management genius, obsessed with numbers, who wrote five books on management and turned GE into the world’s largest, most profitable and most admired company(+). But what has been written shows that his management strategy went awry. The pressure he created and the behaviors he encouraged brought the end of GE. Welch’s managers seem to have created management that focuses on numbers, not facts, to perpetuate the myth of unlimited growth with their accounting games. That’s what Immelt did as well, focusing only on financial results.(-)
Immelt could not eliminate the company’s most important risk, GE Capital and did not immediately intervene in Welch’s complex holding structure. At the heart of General Electric’s downfall was how GE Capital had such a big influence on the parent company and how the financial market adversity put GE in trouble. In the 90s Welch embraced the idea that making money in financial services was much easier than industrial production. While the financial services unit was realizing big dividends with enormous risks, the industrial side was more stable but less profitable.(-)
Immelt spent over $100billion untimely on share repurchases to support earnings per share and thus its stock price.(-) He did not pay any attention to the analyst while he was acquiring expensive companies. The fact that he visited abroad with two planes was perceived as an indication of the management approach that does not care about waste.(-) The board of directors also turned a blind eye to this situation.
There are also commentators who read the book and say that there are many other factors that are prominent in Immelt’s failure: The world that Jeff Immelt thought he would lead GE was turned upside down. The recession and uncertainty that followed the terrorist attacks had slowed the global growth on which GE’s industrial businesses depended. And changes to accounting rules in the wake of the Enron scandal eliminated an easy and reliable source of commercial borrowing that had been used to soften tough times thanks to GE Capital’s balance sheet. (https://www.rightattitudes.com/2020/12/14/lights-out-general-electric-debacle-jack-welch-jeff-immelt)
Immelt was an incurable optimist.(-) Flannery, who was elected instead, soon became to be known for his indecision and never ending analysis.(-) This style of Flannery was tiring out the senior managers who worked with him. Fourteen months before the end of his term, Flannery was fired, perhaps due to widespread public criticism that the board had waited too long to fire Immelt.
Boasting as a talent factory, GE handed over the flag of leadership to an “outsider” for the first time in its 126-year history. (+) New CEO Lawrence Culp has an MBA from Harvard, worked as a lecturer, and was commended for his success at Danaher, a smaller industrial conglomerate. Culp joined GE’s board six months before being appointed as CEO.
The book explores how America’s most iconic companies and the world’s leading businesses can go astray with mismanagement if things go wrong. This book is an interesting story of how a thriving company can be completely destroyed by misfortune and poor leadership.
So, will GE return to its old good days? Let’s state that the problems at GE are not yet over. As early as December 2020, GE accepted a $200million fine to evade the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation for another accounting violation.(-) It looks like old habits die hard! (https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-312 )
GE seems to have habits that are hard to overcome. So, after reading the book and its comments, I became curious. Okay, Immelt failed, and the failure was credited to him. So, if Immelt was successful, who would this success be credited to?
As you may have noticed, I’ve marked some sentences or even the end of the paragraphs (+) i.e. positive action, where I agree. Again I expressed my opinion about that which I don’t agree with using the (-) at the end of the sentences. Hopefully this servers the purpose.
Note: This article, which is open source, can be quoted by mentioning the author. No copyright is required.