QUOTE: GE had always liked to think of itself as a hotbed of research and development in the model of Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory. From the start, though, the company drew as much from the financial brilliance of its co-founder, John Pierpont Morgan, as from Edison’s engineering prowess. A failure to keep up with how equity and debt markets changed in the 21st century is at least as important an element in its downfall as industrial missteps.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/the-collapse-of-ge-s-house-of-debt-was-130-years-in-the-making-20211115-p598v9.html

I think we learned from General Motors that no company is too big to fail, or even come close to failure. Once the world's largest company, General Motors is merely a North American carmaker now and not even the leading one. The wrong managers and poor marketing will destroy any company, regardless of how good the product they offer may be.

With GE, I remember back to the TV ads in the 1970s that finished with "...from the wonderful world of General Electric", as they were a mainstream appliance maker. General Electric, like General Motors, is a niche provider now, by comparison.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Thanks for pointing out this article.

So Jack Welch was a chemist but GE is electrical? This self-styled "business wiz" then turns GE into a Financial Services company. He makes the covers of Fortune & Forbes during the 90's bubble...then comes the 2000 crash, GE staggers thereafter.

More recently Elizabeth Holmes was the latest business "superstar", to make the covers of the Business magazines, Murdoch invests $100m in her dubious enterprise, then one of his own newspapers exposes her company's egregious shortcomings..

The 'GE Genie' ran out of puff here and was pensioned off in a fire sale and is now known as Lattitude Finance, headed up by the Six Million Dollar Man, Ahmed Fahour, the former CEO of the Australian Postal Corporation who was renowned for earning big dollars whilst in that job.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

Welch made his way up GE's management ladder via the plastics division -- hence the chemical engineering connection.

He was an interesting guy, famed for his 'rank and yank' personnel system whereby every division head must fire the lowest performing 10% of their staff annually. No exceptions.

He was all over the management rags back in the day. I almost got a ticket to hear him preach when he came to Sydney but my boss shouted himself a ticket instead. I wanted to experience the man, not so much the message.

It is pertinent to note that in the early days of electrics, many of the theories and developments had their origins from Chemists.

His background in chemistry gave him insight on the company's massive PCB pollution liability where, as quixotic as it may sound, he was fighting the EPA on the science.

QUOTE: GE had always liked to think of itself as a hotbed of research and development in the model of Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory.

I used to work for RCA, at their Princeton NJ R&D labs. Then GE took over RCA and essentially said "Research lab, we don't need no stinkin' research lab", and wanted to close it down. Local politicians got GE to give the lab away to some non-profit operation, but about half of us got canned anyway.

I've not bought anything made or sold by GE since.

Probably the reason GM can no longer design a decent car, they had to get the Aussies to do it for them.

An old truism that brings down a lot of companies: Within he greatest strength of an organisation lays its greatest weakness.

An example is say a political party that gets too big, then the power struggles & infighting begins; Then it falls apart.

Then we have the persons who by nepotism, BS and knifing, (seen a few) get to the top of the tree and then have nowhere to hide. They are found out and fall often along with the tree.

Ian, it is quite true I think. Holden had a full design house, proving ground and engineering team. They were capable of building cars in left and right hand drive and sold them locally and in places like NZ, the US, the UK and the Middle East. GM seems incapable of doing so even though every other carmaker seems to handle it quite well. Apparently the Camaro which is now sold here, comes here in LHD and is converted to RHD by Walkinshaw, same for the GMC pickup.

In the early 2000s when Holden started building the Monaro again, the yanks bought them in great numbers - it was badged as the Pontiac GTO there. I was talking to an American (who was here for work) a couple of years ago and he said my car looked a little familiar. I then asked what car he owned and he had a few, one of which was a GTO. I said that this is the station wagon version of that car and he wondered why Holden never pushed any wagons over there. The US Government had a problem with Holden trying to sell utes over there and simply banned it but apparently there were no restrictions on sedans, wagons or hard tops.

The last Commodore was sold there at the Chevrolet SS and the Caprice was sold there also under a Chev badge - the latter was mainly sold to US police forces to use as chase cars. Even now, three years after Holden was closed down, there are still quite a few in service. They are commonly seen on Youtube videos of police chases.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

If you look carefully a white one appears in this Mythbusters episode:

https://www.facebook.com/MythBusters/videos/adams-u2-flight/10154591181003224/

Sadly I saw one on a Youtube video the other night being written off by the bloke driving it. It was an untimely end to a great car. The video? Idiots in cars compilation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuP21DbgXV8

The 'fun' starts at 0:37 seconds. When people get behind the wheel of a car and can't handle the power output, oil sumps tend to come off second best.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...