I just KNEW it was all Jack Welch's fault

Because he was a local boy made good, and because he ended up in Boston for a while towards the end of his life - just up the street from where I live, in fact - because his third wife's kids were still in school, there was always a lot of stuff in the news about Jack Welch.

And because I was in business, and for decades Jack Welch-ism pretty much defined American business, his theories and modus operandi were always in the ether, there was no escaping him.

Neutron Jack. Mythic leader of GE. Icon.

Me? I never particularly liked Jack Welch.

But, as I said, if you were in business, there was no escaping his influence.

One company I worked for tried to adopt Welch's "get rid of 10% of your workforce each year" approach, in which - no matter how well your company was doing, no matter how good your employees - you ranked everyone and chopped off the bottom 10% of performers. 

In real life, of course, most companies will have poor performers, and one of a manager's responsibilities is to either improve performance or part company with those who aren't working out. But this 10% gone, across the boards, philosophy was pretty arbitrary, and my idea of corporate terrorism. 

Fortunately, at my company, it met with such resistance - managers pretty much refused to fill out the rating sheets - that it never took of.

I do know some people who worked in a company that had adopted this practice, and everyone pretty much hated it. 

When I worked at Wang, as founder Dr. An Wang was passing out and away, they brought in a Jack Welch disciple, Rick Miller, to turn the company around. Miller had come up through the GE management ranks, but wasn't earmarked for the GE C-Suite, so he was free to satisfy his ultra-executive jones elsewhere. So he blew into Wang, and with him came a briefcase chock-full of Jack Welch-y ways of going about things. 

I'll spare you the details here, but I found his reign - even though I wasn't there for much of it - obnoxious. It was also futile. Wang ended up folding.

My closest personal encounter with Jack Welch was when he was being treated for something or other at Mass General Hospital at the same time my husband was. Whatever ailment Welch suffered from, he checked in at the same waiting area where we checked in and waited. 

When you got to the desk, you were asked your name and date of birth. No one paid any attention to who was coming in. If you were there, you had something serious going on and were pretty much focused on yourself. But you got use to the rhythm of hearing people recite their name and birthdate.

I looked up when I heard the person checking in give his name, but only a partial birthdate. No year of birth. Omitting the year broke the rhythm of the recitation, which was the only reason I looked up. My assumption: too vain to give his year of birth. And there, checking in, was Jack Welch.

But the reason I found Jack Welch odious was this:

I was at a corporate learning event, a week long mini-MBA program at Babson College. In one of the sessions, there was a video of Jack Welch humiliating some young schmuck in the GE management trainee program for asking what Jack Welch considered a dumb question. 

The way Jack handled the question was so cruel, so demeaning. You could see the face of the young schmuck - I'm pretty sure his name was Kelly - crumple as he realized he was being called out by the great Jack Welch, and that he was now on the management track to nowhere other than a likely trip to that year's bottom 10%. I often wonder what became of Kelly, but I'm hoping he had a happier life and more successful career outside of GE than he ever would have on the inside. 

Anyway, I never particularly liked Jack Welch.

So I was more than gratified to see a Q&A with New York Times business writer David Gelles, in which Gelles has a lot to say about the great Jack Welch and the role he played in hurting not just GE, but a lot of other companies who adopted the Welch Way. And, in fact, the role he played in harming the overall American economy in terms of growing income inequality and worker insecurity. The title of Gelles' book on Welch is The Man Who Broke Capitalism.

Welch transformed G.E. from an industrial company with a loyal employee base into a corporation that made much of its money from its finance division and had a much more transactional relationship with its

workers.

That served him well during his run as C.E.O., and G.E. did become the most valuable company in the world for a time.

But in the long run, that approach doomed G.E. to failure. The company underinvested in research and development, got hooked on buying other companies to fuel its growth, and its finance division was badly exposed when the financial crisis hit. Things began to unravel almost as soon as Welch retired, and G.E. announced last year it would break itself up

Similar stories played out at dozens of other companies where Welch disciples tried to replicate his playbook, such as Home Depot and Albertsons. So while Welchism can increase profits in the short-term, the long-term consequences are almost always disastrous for workers, investors and the company itself. (Source: NY Times)

I. Just. Knew. It. 

Jack Welch. Icon? Schmicon! 

Think I'm gonna get me David Gelles' book.