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Jack Welch, the Man Who Broke Capitalism (2022)

(www.forbes.com)
122 points throw0101b | 1 comments | 02 Jul 25 10:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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camillomiller ◴[02 Jul 25 11:53 UTC] No.44442592[source]▶
The fundamental problem I have with this analysis is that it won’t consider a simple assumption: Jack Welch was just better at the capitalism game than others. He didn’t rewrite the written rules, he just didn’t care about the ethic-based unwritten ones. With the decline of historical ideologies, hyper-individualism took over. Welch was just very good at understanding that some invisible boundaries didn’t apply anymore, and that the zeitgeist was shifting in that direction.
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1. fossa1 ◴[02 Jul 25 12:54 UTC] No.44443168[source]▶
> Welch was just very good at understanding that some invisible boundaries didn’t apply anymore, and that the zeitgeist was shifting in that direction

Agreed, Welch didn’t invent shareholder primacy, but he industrialized it. What makes him so consequential isn’t that he played the game better, but that he normalized a playbook that treated human capital as expendable