At Any Cost

Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric and one of the most renowned figures in today's business world, has been seen by some as the model corporate leader and by others as the quintessential unmitigated pursuer of profit. In this book, the man and his methods, and the legendary company he runs, are examined. As we watch Welch's spectacular rise through the ranks at GE, we see his impetuousness, his aggressiveness, his lightning strikes. We see the making of an extraordinary leader who is a catalyst for change, who anticipates events rather than merely reacting to them, and who confronts complacency with blitzkrieg action. But success for a company can come at a price for the community. As Thomas F. O'Boyle shows, long before most chief executives had heard of corporate restructuring - and long before "downsizing" became a word heard daily in American life - Welch was practicing both. As the story of his seventeen-year tenure unfolds, we see him eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, send other jobs abroad, buy and sell hundreds of businesses, remove entire echelons from the corporate hierarchy, and shift the company's focus from long-established manufacturing businesses to entertainment and finance. His approach to personnel cuts earned him the nickname "Neutron Jack." In its latest incarnation, the vast manufacturing company that Thomas Edison began in 1878 has also been caught up in miscues and legal difficulties: defective refrigerators brought to market; industrial wastes improperly buried; excessive radiation in the workplace; fraud in military contract procurement; a financial service division's improprieties that landed on the front page. All the while, shareholders have reaped enormous gains - but, the author asks, at what cost?