Thread regarding General Electric Co. layoffs

Same here. Having seen the downward spiral, due to the top down view of GRC as "Ivory Tower", later as a "vendor" by the businesses and also due to the lack luster performance on REAL product development and scale up by the GRC team in general, I agree with everything said in this post.

I believe there was a ALL HANDS today at GRC. Did the boss announce his departure and the appointment of the new head ( from India) to take over the closing down of the division in the coming year or two as mentioned in one of the earlier replies..??

Great post! As a researcher in GRC I cannot agree more on all points in the text.

What is worse, I have an impression that nobody among so-called leadership truly cares or wants to bring GRC back to the former glory and higher-quality research. Every executive is too busy climbing the corporate ladder and jumps the ship at the first opportunity , think DM.

I had to read this twice to convince myself this wasn't a post by one of my colleagues that I spent almost 40 yrs with in another GE business. This post is spot on with the actions our GE business followed. Customers could no longer rely on GE as the go to for the best product,expertise and sound advice. They COULD count on a smoke and mirrors power point presentation and I will look into your questions with no follow up. For those of us who were fortunate to retire, not many of us were proud of what was left behind and this post sums up why. Just my opinion.

Right on ex-GRC mate!

“Too many projects were taken on that should have and could have been done in the businesses. Too many design-oriented projects led to GRC being in competition with the design groups in the business, leading to unhealthy rivalries and a dilution of the uniqueness of the GRC skill set, and the view of the businesses that GRC had something unique to offer”

Technical incompetence at mid leadership led to this shift of hiring hackers to do dog and pony shows, instead of ground breaking research like we used to do. It was done to get easy funding from businesses or corporate who were also managed by incompetent people who thought they can bypass or accelerate Product Development work by funding or just supporting GRC demos and pilots. Competition with business units was real and sad. People would applaud during symposium and then bad mouth GRC behind the scenes for vaporware- a direct result of such competition for precious R&D $s.

To fix this, go back to hiring world class researchers, flatten the organization and focus on real research, not hacking using 3rd party technologies. Focus on more R and less D in R&D.

Agreed great post. In a nutshell GE stopped managing their product to manage money and slowly technical was replaced by bean counter spreadsheets.

I look at our engineering and it's appalling, everyone are glorified admin people without a clue about technical subjects, who just push emails around in the hope someone solves it.

Even more sad is that the current leadership is more "I Melt", nothing is going to change with this lot, they'll keep looking at their spreadsheets, ignoring where the source of the problem is.

Bad management from inexperienced leadership.

What you say is exactly what is destroying GE now by every measure.

Stock price, cash flow, bloated costs and inefficiencies, lousy service GE Power customer base, and bad decision after bad decision. GE needs to be fixed from the bottom up where only experts with good judgment and expert knowledge become managers and business leaders.

Cutting only across the board, mainly gutting out older experts will only make things worse.

This unfortunately has been happening the last decade or so and now GE Power is a mess, and everyone knows it Including our customers.

Ask our customers how they like dealing with GE individuals who are not experts and can't fix their problems

Everything in this article is very well stated. I witnessed this type of management from GE when they purchased a business I had worked for. The previous owners made management prospective's work their way up the corporate ladder. They would bring business team managers in right out of school. I use to say do they even know what this company makes. I personally feel the older generations of employees have been the brick and mortar of past company success stories. I am not one bit surprised to see the company stock prices falling and the very unfortunate process of laying employees who still might be employed if there were better management at the top of the corporate ladder.

Spot on in every point you have made about the way GRC has failed over the years. Greedy/lazy/bad technologists, engineers and scientists became managers before acquiring any technical expertise maturity and credibility ( with the business stake holders and technologists).Some good technical folks were forced to become leaders and managers , which they were NOT and DID NOT want to be. On top of these, hiring, placing & promoting to meet the overhead numbers and maintain the politically correct optics of the staff led to mediocrity. From a flat org structure we have gone through ( in 30 yrs) at least 5 reorgs and now 4 layers of technical expertise with disproportionately high management layers and overheads. To add to the misery, was the starting of GRCs all over the world, which turned out to be high effective cost, low productivity,and resource draining, definitely not achieving the goal of creating and establishing the GE brand. NOT to worry, going forward... I hear that the present Chief inGRC Nisky is going to move out to take care of other business ( back in POWER?!) to be replaced by the head of India center whose job it will be to eventually move the folks working on relevant contract programs to the respective and close down the CENTER for good.

Absolutely spot on.

Agreed. A ton of wasted talent taking shortcuts to get into positions they haven't really earned and can't execute effectively. The result isn't pretty.

You are right on the money with this post. People need to have a deep understanding of the business and their customers before making decisions that impact the lives of a great deal of people. Those 12,000 people getting laid-off are 12,000 families that are being affected. Some will recover and move on but those that are older might never recover and have to make tough decisions in the years ahead just to make ends meet.

Excellent points! In the businesses, the 6 sigma program became the ad hoc fast track to advancement but didn't focus on product development as it focused on manipulation of statistics and their presentation as a 6 sigma project. Six Sigma became a internal business rather than a product design tool as intended. It led to duplication of effort, as a completed task would have to be done again as a six sigma project to satisfy the design groups metric for six sigma projects when the true metric should have been completed designs. Six Sigma, like the CAS, was viewed as the dominant factor for managerial positions which led to the appointment of technically incompetent managers who did not have the skills to make engineering decisions.