The death of great American legend and the pain of those who remember it alive and well

This article comes across as charged with emotion and nostalgia. However, many employees, especially those long-tenured, do agree that the company has changed dramatically over the years, for worse.

The fundamental issue is that of a complete and total leadership failure. On many levels. There have been some robust analyses put forth, and many proposed points are valid and painfully true.

However, several posts on this board, and also some comments under the LI article, point to a critically important and insidious problem.

The company’s storied culture rewarding talent, deep expertise, experience, and enlightened, energetic, true leadership has been altered somewhere along the way to have become a highly-politicized bureaucracy paying lip service to the formally-espoused concept of meritocracy. The ranks of senior management have been saturated over the years with people without true life and commercial experience, who move from a role to role on an accelerated timetable, failing to develop necessary competencies and whose sole goal is upward progression. There are ranks of home-grown senior managers, directors and VPs who have been installed into positions of rapidly-growing responsibility straight out of college, never delivered a real product, never ran a P&L, never developed an outside perspective allowing any sort of critical and honest introspection on the company’s culture and way of doing business. And, with many a so-called-leader having clearly no aptitude for or even an ability to understand what true leadership is about. In addition, the people’s work and achievements are now often rewarded for reasons mostly detached from their true contributions to the company. Institutionalized nepotism (“not what you know but whom you know”) and centrally-driven activism (“not what and how you do but who you are”) reign supreme.

Those factors have weakened the culture to the near-breaking point, with many cracks throughout the system. Once cash flows have dried up (the sale of financial arm was the tipping point), these inefficiencies could no longer be masked and have actually finally fractured the company to expose the rot within.

There are many, many good, talented, dedicated, hard-working employees – and yes, including some managers and leaders – who have given up their health, life, time with family to perform up to par and above. The true pillars of this organization, those carrying the load. Their hearts are crying out in disbelief and agonizing pain for what they have seen as replacement of excellence with mediocrity and substance with appearance as self-perpetuating and reinforcing values of this new culture. They view them as representing and facilitating a gross misappropriation by the entitled class of their sacrifice and deepest pride in working for this historically-storied company.

Any attempt to fix or heal this organization for the long run will have been ultimately unsuccessful until these issues have been addressed broadly and systemically. Any attempt to do so will not be easy, and it will make or break the company.

Interesting article. As others mentioned, many of the people mentioned as leaders in the article turned out to be weak and ineffective. Even a well crafted story cannot cover up rot forever.

The GE he knew was full of rot. Admittedly, many companies are, but that does not excuse our own mistakes.

For all the problems the Power business has today (and they do have real problems), without WMC, Long Term Care Insurance, numerous botched acquisitions, an ill-advised buyback, and a chronically underfunded pension, the company would be in an OK position. All of those items I just mentioned are 100% the result of bad decisions or outright breach of fiduciary duty by the leaders of the GE he knew.

Thread regarding General Electric Co. layoffs

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