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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: 0s | 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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pyrale ◴[02 Jul 25 12:21 UTC] No.44442849[source]▶
The invisible boundaries did apply, and they still do. The story isn't that he saw that some rules no longer applied, it's that he was willing to go to war about it.

Post WW2, we had gradually managed to build a less violent society, and at some point, some CEOs decided: "You know, the Ludlow massacre and the Bisbee deportation were not that bad". And now, we get the pushback, where some employees think that murdering a CEO in the middle of Manhattan is fair game.

Rules didn't disappear. But people are more willing to go to conflict about them.

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1. salawat ◴[02 Jul 25 15:03 UTC] No.44444628[source]▶
Welch in his early career was kept in check in part by Oldtimers who were alive for the experience of the time of the Robber Barons, and the heyday of the American Labor Union. These times were characterized by men willing to do violence to break strikers and likewise to coordinate to make it nigh impossible for the more narcissistic to ascend to power due to actual class solidarity.

Welch wasn't a problem until what he feared, backlash from people who had been around for the last cycle of cruelty precipitated by his ideas, sufficiently died/attritioned out.

Give Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames a read.

He does an excellent job at laying out the pedigree of thought from slave/plantation management to modern American management theory, and charting out the trends and consequences that arise from political shifts in the equilibrium between capital and labor.

https://www.amazon.com/Going-Postal-Rebellion-Workplaces-Col...