Vic Abate, VP of GE Global Research Center (GRC) orders the layoff of 249 highly skilled technicians, scientists, and engineers. Only one week later, he sends out a center wide email detailing how great it is to work at GRC and how important it is to now focus on hiring great young talent.
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I was working at GRC before. The researchers are definitely the greatest assets. They are highly skilled, experienced, and smart. And most of them are very hard working. However, the problems are from the management and cultures.
- First, people are working for visibility not for solving problem or research. Therefore, people are chasing the so-called "project leader" as the project leader got the chance to brag and talk with higher level managers. However, project leaders are mostly the people who are good at making slides and talking, lack of real R&D skills and mindset. They just took team's work away and talk above. This creates a very big culture that no body is willing to spend time in lab but in office making story and slides.
- Managers are the people promoted from the pool of "project leader". However, my observation is that manager is promoted just by how many projects did they lead or how close they are with the boss. Therefore, GRC's managers are all good talkers and making story with buzz word. They can not manage and tell who is technically better in his/her team. This will create a bad culture that every guy is chasing "project leader" rather than being a good and strong technical expert.
- There are too many leaders with different titles in the center. If you work in a high-visibility project, the number of leaders in the meeting room is more than the individual contributors. This dilute the responsibility and slow down the decision making. The function of these so-called "leaders" are just making slides or pass information across.
- Most project cannot last longer than three years. People keep jumping from one project to another with higher visibility. Considering the power and political fight in projects, the passion from talented people decay over years.
- Lastly, many people who work longer than 5 years are more and more "cynical". As they went through project cycles over and over again, they know what will happen even when the new project starts. Many people are not happy and just don't care anything.
Vic is an awful leader who cares only about himself and anyone that bootlicks figuratively and literally if you’re female...ask around) for him and tells him how great he is. Zero humility, zero integrity and unwarranted pride. Ruined Power with the H engine that the market didn’t need. Yet, he thinks he’s the smartest guy in any room. He’s the old school GE leader that got promoted for all the wrong reasons and destroys shareholder value just by his self serving decisions that benefit him but not the enterprise. Sell!
GE is a failed company, rotten to the core. Bad leadership, shoddy morale and horrible business ethics for many years are now taking their toll.
GRC is at the core of all this. Hardly ever have I experienced such a superb assembly of idiotic self-proclaimed experts and wannabe-scientists.
Abate dows not help at all, granted, but he is not the only reason this thing is going down.
GEs failure is well-deserved after many years of mediocre performance on all levels
https://hbr.org/2007/04/avoiding-integrity-land-mines
Vic Abate ruined GE Power by bad decision after bad decision with his six sigma goons.
GE Power has been gutted out of experts who were fired for being O-L-D and the rest mostly quit in disgust and or retired. Much of the low efficiency, bloated management with little product expertise who just pass thru doing anything just to get promoted from fake cost savings are now bleeding GE Power of cash flow.
He appears to be doing the same at GRD
Vic is a member if the GE mafia...corrupt to the core...
Vic had ge power hire one son right after he went to grc. This son is actually a good guy
He had to do that yo get his POS son a job there.
GE Global Research has laid off quite a number of folks, plus others are leaving on their own leaving many areas understaffed. Further some labs have been mothballed and there may be plans to close additional facilities in an effort to meet corporate cost cutting needs.
If any of the positions are hired back to younger talent the people let go need to Sue. Ge is committing the biggest occurrence of Ageism that I will witness in my lifetime.
I love new math. 249 highly skilled technicians, scientists, and engineers = 1 competent GE executive. Oh. Wait is that a divide by zero?
Funny that just when you are absolutely certain you are the smartest person in the room, reality sets in. I recommend we fill all executive positions in GE with fresh-graduated MBA students, effective immediately. Give the unique little snowflakes a shot! Sorry Vic, that means we are both out. But we will have 7 bathrooms and a napping/massage facility at every site.
Got caught in the layoffs last year. This type of "strategy" for covering their asses when they do sh-- business strategy needs to come to an end. I need business journals and others to publicly trash this company as unless desperate there is zero reason for anyone looking for a job to want to work there as it's always a matter of time till layoffs will occur.
Many jobs created for crapass execs who have no bizness skills and no desire to make GE better. Good people were laid off...pregnant woman and her husband, people hired in the last 10 months. Those execs should be treated the same way.
GE Global Research is a great place to work until you don't. Recruiters take note, some excellent people were released (and some marginal people were kept). Not clear that the management was really aware who was generating the revenue.
Those executives are all the same - they only care about their azzess only.