Thread regarding General Electric Co. layoffs

Once the deck chairs at the top get rearranged, it will be time to address the E-band fraternity within GE...whose entitled attitude leads to underperforming, self-interest and lack of doing what's best for the customer. This self-absorbed culture cares first about personal gain and last bout about orders, revenue, quality manufacturing and outstanding customer service. This is what has made GE great for many years...but now...the E-band "leadership" population that are expected to light the path...lack the skills and know-how to meet the challenge. E-bands have all the buzz words and flashy PPT's...but they are really just followers and not the cut of people to roll up their sleeves and get the hard work done. When the lower-levels layoffs begin before the end of '17 and into '18...if GE gets this E-band reconciliation wrong...the years to come will be worse than what we have today!

GE will never learn it's lessons. Everyone of the GE businesses go through normal up and down business cycles. One business is built to last. That is called GE aviation. Why, because military spending is up. I remember a business GE used to own called KAPL (look it up, cost plus GOCO). Engineers used to move from GE power to KAPL when times got tough in commercial power. Why was that important it preserved GE talent in an area. That cycle is now happening for Power ..down cycle is here. GE has no choice but to let the people in Power because it acquired a white elephant named Alstom. They have too much overhead for the factory backlog. The problem is all those good white collar experienced people are going to the competition to find a job. This process is going to hurt GE power in the long run. The GE portfolio as a whole is not built for up and down cycles. There are not offsetting businesses to pick up the slack like the days of old. There is no GE capital with huge knobs to turn to make up the financial misses. Hey, emperor has no cloths ! Jeff created a damn mess for John to pick up the pieces. Sorry but Jeff and his round table of stock option buddies have put John in a nasty position cut the crap out of every division including corporate, cut the dividend. He needs to look to buy offsetting businesses or sell off all the parts...break it up.

https://www.fool.com/careers/2017/10/12/a-step-by-step-guide-to-handling-a-layoff.aspx

COPY AND PASTE LINK! BE PREPARED FOR THE STORM! CAREERS AT GE ARE A THING OF THE PAST! YES THE CEO’s DID THEIR THING TO THE COMPANY, BUT THAT DONT FIX THE MESS YOUR IN! I am retired and your screwed! START APPLICATIONS AND RESUMES! STORM IS HERE!

Simple answer-Leadership.

I have been with GE for 37 yrs and saw the business change under Welch to Immelt and have a few observations.

1. Vision:

Welch was clear, #1 or 2 in each segment, "right sizing" Digitization, Low cost countries.

What was Jeff's vision...? Ecoimagination, Digital, Globalization, "bolt on acquisitions", Infrastructure, Industrials. Too me, he flailed from one to another. Anyone remember getting rid of the "back office"?

1. Execution

Welch was very focused on execution and kept a tight reign on cost.

Immelt seemed to focus on big themes, acquisitions and to me GE has become sloppy. Several earnings misses in his tenure and very uneven year to year. Welch had one miss in nearly 20 yrs. Multiple re-orgs and integrations most of which failed and were closed or sold off in part of whole. Alstom, Steve Bolze's white whale, is in the process of doing the same. These distract the businesses and staff.

1. Seeing around the corner

Welch was very astute, with a few exceptions, in buying and selling of businesses or launching initiatives. Other CEO's followed Welch's lead (low cost countries, Digitization, Six Sigma).

Jeff bought companies at the peak (oil & gas) and sold at the lows or before recovery (financials). Letting Capital get too big. Always playing from behind.

Immelt inherited the Welch premium effect in the stock price, 9/11 and the financial crisis. He did put money into product development, Welch had starved the pipeline in his last 5 yrs. But in 16 yrs he never put GE on a trajectory to overcome these. He may be remembered as the CEO that destroyed a 125 yr old icon, time will tell.

As previously mentioned, demographics drove the hiring not qualifications . HR could then check all the corporate boxes. With a shrinking workforce we seriously lacked the qualifications required to operate with expertise in our business. This became quite evident with our customers and we were no longer reliable as experts or leaders in our business. I witnessed more focus on identity group functions and celebrations than meaningfull product discussions to get new products that customers wanted into the market. A balanced employee pallet is a nice objective ,but at the expense of job qualifications the results were quite obvious to senior employees the team was becoming weaker and weaker. It truly was becoming the blind leading the blind. Just my opinion.

Hey why don't you stab the guy in the back (metaphorically speaking). What about the others in the company.....did they have a voice or were they just vegetables.

The board not having the courage to tell immelt he failed especially after 2007/08.

Immelts mantra "double digit growth" when it was clearly economically unachievable.

Sacking excellent managers who failed to achieve double digit growth and replacing them with mediocrity who did understand their industries.

Wanting to be the #1 or #2 in each industry another unrealistic target.

Focusing on social media instead of the real world, their is nothing wrong with spirit and letter, the rest, the behaviours etc just crap for the mediocre to hide behind.

Getting rid of the cash cows.

Employing visionaries who lack depth or understanding...treating the company as a startup.

Most importantly not being true to what you are which is a multinational conglomerate.

We are the joke nowadays, even worse since the day we said “GE is going to be the top 10 software company in 2020”.

Goog or FB or AMZ or APL would be the joke too, if they said “we will be the top 10 infrastructure industries (making jet engines/Power generators/CT scanners) in 2025”.

Wrong management/leadership culture. Immelt not only did wrong business decision but also drove the whole company into bad culture. Simplification and PD tools are just joke to brainwash employees to focus on deliverables. However the leadership don’t know that incompetent or non capable leaders can use such to blend/blur top management vision into REAL ground level results. To get rid of rating, is the way of non-transparency of meritocracy. It actually builds wall between management and the employees.

This x1000: "The short term quarterly focus drives a behavior of reactionary tactics that is like kool-aid you can’t get enough of it. The constant restructuring and job eliminations has put the company in turmoil for the last five years with no long term vision or sustainable growth. The organizational churn has to stop to allow a sense of direction and purpose."

As long as the shareholders demand to come first, the customer and GE sales will suffer. "Customers determine our success " Is horesh#t.

A word to the wise never let Finance try to run Operations! Everything revolves around the bean counters who have never had to run an operation or be accountable for the results yet they set the expectations and then critique everything you do...like they could execute better! When you let numbers get in the way of sound operational principles this where you end up. Additionally the short term quarterly focus drives a behavior of reactionary tactics that is like kool-aid you can’t get enough of it. The constant restructuring and job eliminations has put the company in turmoil for the last five years with no long term vision or sustainable growth. The organizational churn has to stop to allow a sense of direction and purpose. The culture needs reparation with putting competent Leadership back in p,ace that know the business and integrity needs to be back to the forefront of what we do as the corporate pressures have sidelined any integrity at the Senior Leadership levels as they will do anything to hit the numbers.

My time with GE coincided with Immelt's tenure. What destroyed this company .. giving up on meritocracy and focusing on 'diversity' and 'inclusiveness'. Both became easy weapons for the incompetent people to try to control and eliminate those who were trying to actually do a honest day's work. Promoting people based on gender and not qualifications ... cult like repetition of buzzwords and mantras of the day ...promoted by a toxic HR system. No critical thought, debate or engineering disciple. It devolved into all out politics and greed in the last 4-5 years. All to protect an incompetent and insecure CEO. If you look at GE's bench, all the good leaders left in the last few years ... compare that to the bench of leadership Jack Welch had. Jeff made sure nobody around could challenge him.

Except .. thankfully .. he did not account for Trian.

Immelt broke the model....selling off all short cycle businesses that maintained cash flow and now we’re left with long cycle businesses where we’ve played the financial game leveraging long term contracts to show revenue growth with no cash. Now that we’ve played that game for years it’s finally caught up with us!

With all Welch did right the worst decision he ever made was to put Immelt in as CEO...I’ll bet money that Jack would even admit it! It has to be tearing him apart to see what’s been done to this company since he retired with a great legacy and Immelt was forced out in disgrace! Believe me it was no planned retirement...the BOD incompetence let him go out that way when he should have been fired with no golden parachute.

Cash is king...GE sold all its receivables to meet cash targets and now has an empty bank account.

Meritocracy needs to be brought back into the qualifications of Leadership. Without that you get the smoke and mirrors of great PowerPoints with no substance and worse “no results” Immelt was salesman and he sold the company out from under our feet and spent $12B on the biggest blunder in company history. Additionally fostered the culture we have today in Leaders...they won’t listen instead they force unrealistic targets that regardless of the reality of the environment they bully people to hit the numbers! Well now see what that type of incompetent Leadership gets us when a major reset happens which includes layoffs of unbelievable proportions. Prepare for the stock to drop into the teens. Jeff hope your enjoying the millions you’ve stolen from the company you ruined now numerous families will be impacted by your self-righteous arrogance over the past 16 years. How about writing a check back to GE!

GE's leadership program has for many years filled the company with priviledged under achievers. They don't know the business just how to move up in the company. Fowler is the head cheerleader. Jim could be a good leader if he would just stop promoting the stupid leadership program.

It's a familiar story. People are put into roles they know little about and they, in turn, promote their buddies into positions they are not suitable for. The people higher up don't know enough about the specific processes and the result is a mess and loss of revenue, no question. There is no point asking what's gone wrong when you have this. Failure is inevitable.

I've been with the company for 17 years, in two different segments, and can see one of the biggest issues is the way they have been hiring management. They hire on a demographic, not on qualifications. Along with that, they bring in people that don't know the product or processes, and are too arrogant to listen to the "little people" on the floor in order to learn.

Top heavy. Invested too many wrong business.. aka Alstom. And too many outsoucing which on surface looked great . But that loaded US based overhead. And they need lots of babysit and they switch jobs as soon as they get trained.

Management schools explain the advantages and pitfalls of mergers and acquisitions and why even big corporations get it wrong. Apart from looking into the obvious failures in leadership and management, this is the area I would look into next.

Many of the things negatively impacting our company, have not been about if the decision was right, because it was, but, the timing of the decision was off.

The other main contributor is that a shift of culture to "Business Leaders" vs. scientists, innovators, and inventors being developed.

It would be interesting to see a year by year # of patents and vs. a 5 year revenue stream after the filing. To lead, you need something that you have that folks want. you cant expect a room full of leaders with nothing to market to be successful. Just one mans opinion

Yes it can be that simple.