From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric, by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann, memorably describes how one of America’s oldest, biggest and most celebrated companies started taking wrong turns under its charismatic (and probably over-rated) CEO Jack Welch and his successor, Jeff Immelt, and ended up much less profitable, smaller and weaker.
This is superb corporate history, with the right mix of historical context and big picture stuff and anecdotes that add spice to the tale of very smart, but sometimes very wrongheaded and arrogant, execs making disastrous mistakes as well as, to be fair, achieving some surprising successes. Overpriced acquisitions and mountains of debt played a big role in the burgeoning woes of the conglomerate, along with dubious creative accounting, which some have alleged verged on fraud.
It’s a sort of a mystery story: How could such a huge and diversified company get into such trouble?
By the way, from all the negative news about GE in the investment community in the past couple of years you might not remember that it remains a very big company. Last year, GE was ranked among the Fortune 500 as America’s 21st-largest firm as measured by gross revenue.
New Englanders in particular will want to read about the very human reasons that the company moved its headquarters to Boston after many years in Fairfield, Conn.
