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Summary: Typical liberal reviews and book
Review: Anti-corporate Cassandras grind axes to sparse audiences these days. In O'Boyle's piddling attempt to make us outraged at GE, he destroys his own credibility. By attempting to pin every social ill of the late 20th century on Jack Welch-- a good, if ruthless CEO-- his ideological ship spins wildly out of control. Downsizing is his fault. (Hello, organizations are becoming streamlined all over the developed world) Media sensationalism is his fault. (Welch personally delights in the bottom dwelling content of Dateline NBC) Anybody who has ever worked for a corporation, especially one as big as GE, knows a few things that should make readers way of O'Boyle's hokey cause and effect analysis: 1. The CEO does not micromanage his or her company-- thousands of important decisions are made under a CEOs jurisdiction every day. 2. Corporations are not social utopias, and shouldn't be. People get fired sometimes. But people are also given opportunities to do interesting work. And competition is good. 3. If there is a ubitiquitous problem in society, e.g. families are no longer as stable, a corporation, which is sample unit of social organization, will usually reflect, or possibly be linked more directly to that problem. However, small minds confuse this with causality, not understanding the methodological pitfall of ad hoc ergo propter hoc. For example- families break up more, partially because people don't balance work and family very well. Lots of people work for corporations. Corporations caused the decline of the American family. Read the book-- O'Boyle is guilty of not understanding these truths and more.
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Summary: Typical liberal reviews and book
Review: Business is designed to make profit. If people don't like that they can go live in the People Republic of China and see how it is to live in a society without our form of capitalizm. Everyday I get amazed at peoples stupidity and reading this just futhers my opinion. Stupid liberals who just don't understand the business way.
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Summary: This book does a lot to reassess the spin given to J. Welch
Review: I can not speak to the "accuracy" of the events described in this book but I will say the stories told seem very compelling. J. Welch is held as "the model" for CEO's and by default for potential executives. This book instructs us that the role model the "street" would have us follow is not always the best. No one can argue with the profitability that GE has enjoyed over the years but if the accounts told in this book are accurate then the question has to be asked "profitability at what price?"
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Summary: Some people will sell their soul for profit
Review: O"Boyle exposes an excellent example of what is wrong with the American business climate today. Corporate profiteers concerned with short term gain at the expense of everything else. Well written, easy to read, very enlightening, this book strikes out at the venerable institutions which though held in high esteem, should be looked on with contempt. Extremely well researched, the only thing missing from this book is a response from Jack Welch. Boy, I'm glad I don't work for General Electric.
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Summary: It is easy to look rich when you do not pay all the bills.
Review: The public perception of Jack Welch's tenure at General Electric has been that he focused business effort on his company's core competencies, and thus rewarded the long term shareholder with great financial returns. Tom O'Boyle peers behind the curtain to reveal the darker side of Wizard Welch and his disastrous tenure at one of America's great industrial treasures. Yes, Welch increased GE's stock value; but Welch did it with a draconian management style that failed to pay all of the bills along the way. It is easy to look rich when you don't pay your bills.O'Boyle identifies some of the unpaid bills, including: 1) The human cost of GE's massive layoffs througout the 1980's. Welch embraced and greatly popularized the "layoff" approach to business: lay off bodies, save money, show more profit. But for every dollar the company profited, others lost. Much of the cost of the layoffs fell on individuals, families and communities that saw jobs at US-based GE operations vanish. This caused untold hardship to both families and governments, which had to rebuild shattered lives and communities. Not all survived, literally. 2) Welch took a rich and deep GE culture of research and development into technological fields, and utterly gutted it. GE's R&D abilities formerly covered a spectrum from steam turbines to appliances to jet engines to railway locomotives. Under Welch, GE's R&D arm became so weak and atrophied that the company's product lines lost the once commanding technological lead they formerly enjoyed. The company's future is betrayed. (Not satisfied with merely gutting GE's R&D, Welch purchased RCA and stripped its assets as well. Only NBC television remains in the GE fold as a major, former-RCA asset. Shockingly, NBC spends more each year to broadcast basketball games than GE spends on R&D. It is so sad, when you think that the only man-made object ever to leave the solar system, Voyager spacecraft, carries a camera that bears the RCA logo.) 3) GE's continuing failure to clean up the PCB's and radioactivity it has left behind in its numerous manufacturing operations; while at the same time making a business unit out of cleaning up PCB's and other pollution for other customers. The unpaid bills also do not include the people who remain afflicted with industrial illnesses from their exposure to chemicals in the GE workplaces over the years. These are just a few of the topics. The book is profound, and will shock the unitiated. O'Boyle is a historian of American industrial history. He takes the reader on a trip through time, from the laboratories of Edison; to the early workshops of Ford; to the mills of Carnegie; to Tom Watson's IBM; to Rickover's nuclear navy; and so much more. O'Boyle spent eleven years with the Wall Street Journal, and he knows how to dig out the story and tell it in the best journalistic style. Also, as the notes reveal, O'Boyle has met and talked with many of the luminaries and leaders of American and European industry of this era. O'Boyle has captured the essence of an American tragedy, which was GE's abandonment of its research-oriented, manufacturing legacy to satisfy the ego of one man. Jack Welch started at GE selling plastics, and he has become his own product. It seems that Jack Welch, who came into control of one of the nation's greatest industrial enterprises, really wanted only to run a credit card company as his life's ambition. Today he has his wish, but the nation has lost.
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Summary: An excellent book documenting how Welch ruined GE's soul.
Review: This is an accurate accounting of how Welch ruined the very heart and soul of a wonderful company--one which employees were proud of their association before Welch. I worked many years for GE, both before Welch was CEO and after, and the book read like "this is your life". It is so sad that other executives appear to be on the edge of their chair waiting for every word spoken by Welch and to learn from him the theme of the year or the latest corporate slogan to espouse. I do hope this book becomes a best seller as it would give me confidence that more people would understand the depth of the problems Jack has created. And lastly, I would hope that our business schools would make this required reading to best illustrate how NOT to run a business.
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Summary: Baby With the Bathwater
Review: When GE's massive downsizing took place in Pittsfield, MA, I was a frustrrated local official trying to find out what was going on. GE officials furnished little information. Eventually it was thought the GE must have done it to simply stay competitive in the new global economy. Thomas O'Boyle furnishes the answer. The layoffs and plant closings were Jack Welch's idea of a corporate revolution. He was at the cutting edge of a major business philosophy which discarded post-WW II corporate paternalism in favor of downsizing chic. Layoffs and plant closings, formerly the last options of businesses in trouble, became fashionable fiist options in the pursuit of higher profits. Welch, according to O'Boyle, created a work place of purposeful job insecurity. The profit outcome mattered more than people. GE managers had to hit a home run to be number one in profits or they were out. This quest to be number one, wrote O'Boyle, was a major reason for GE, as one of the Pentagon's 100 largest defense contractors, to become the leading corporate criminal in cheating the government to show larger profits. GE could have remained in my city and stayed competitive in comsumer electronic products, but the profits would not have been high enough for Welch's quest to be number one. My city is a long way from recovering from the economic blow of losing about 9, 000 GE jobs. I take serious issue with such revewiers as NY Times, Roger Lowenstein that O;Boyle is wrong and that , "America has reaped a huge dividend (from the layoffs and plant closings): the added goods and services that GE's former workers contribute in other lines of work" Mr. Lwenstein should come to my city to see how wrong he is. Unfortunately GE's corporate practices are now the standard for business in this country. And so long as GE's and other stockholders are happy with their returns on a surging stock market these corporate practices will continue. However, O'Boyle has shown the bad effects of this corporate practice and one has to hope that hope that eventually some corporate leaders, and there are some according to O'Boyle, who will begin to realize they have a duty to their workers and the community and not only stockholders. O'Boyle raises the interesting question of who will follow Welch soon as the new CEO at GE and more importantly what will be his management style. GE does not have to be number one in profits. It can and should show the way in leading us back to a corporate world of responsibiltiy for its workers and the communities it does business in. I hope the next GE leader takes O'Boyle's book seriously and tries to remedy the bad employee and communtiy practices of Welch
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Summary: GE"s Sad Affair With Downsizing-Frank Jakubowicz
Review: When GE's massive downsizing took place in Pittsfield, MA, I was a frustrrated local official trying to find out what was going on. GE officials furnished little information. Eventually it was thought the GE must have done it to simply stay competitive in the new global economy. Thomas O'Boyle furnishes the answer. The layoffs and plant closings were Jack Welch's idea of a corporate revolution. He was at the cutting edge of a major business philosophy which discarded post-WW II corporate paternalism in favor of downsizing chic. Layoffs and plant closings, formerly the last options of businesses in trouble, became fashionable fiist options in the pursuit of higher profits. Welch, according to O'Boyle, created a work place of purposeful job insecurity. The profit outcome mattered more than people. GE managers had to hit a home run to be number one in profits or they were out. This quest to be number one, wrote O'Boyle, was a major reason for GE, as one of the Pentagon's 100 largest defense contractors, to become the leading corporate criminal in cheating the government to show larger profits. GE could have remained in my city and stayed competitive in comsumer electronic products, but the profits would not have been high enough for Welch's quest to be number one. My city is a long way from recovering from the economic blow of losing about 9, 000 GE jobs. I take serious issue with such revewiers as NY Times, Roger Lowenstein that O;Boyle is wrong and that , "America has reaped a huge dividend (from the layoffs and plant closings): the added goods and services that GE's former workers contribute in other lines of work" Mr. Lwenstein should come to my city to see how wrong he is. Unfortunately GE's corporate practices are now the standard for business in this country. And so long as GE's and other stockholders are happy with their returns on a surging stock market these corporate practices will continue. However, O'Boyle has shown the bad effects of this corporate practice and one has to hope that hope that eventually some corporate leaders, and there are some according to O'Boyle, who will begin to realize they have a duty to their workers and the community and not only stockholders. O'Boyle raises the interesting question of who will follow Welch soon as the new CEO at GE and more importantly what will be his management style. GE does not have to be number one in profits. It can and should show the way in leading us back to a corporate world of responsibiltiy for its workers and the communities it does business in. I hope the next GE leader takes O'Boyle's book seriously and tries to remedy the bad employee and communtiy practices of Welch
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