Thread regarding General Electric Co. layoffs

Good description!

I watched helplessly for the last year or two of JI's tenure while he used billions of cash to buyback stocks to help sustain the price for as long as he could. No objection from the Board. Power, Oil & Gas, Lighting, and Capital were faltering. Debt needed to be paid down during those years instead because cash flow was going to slow down. Diminishing profits were eventually going to hurt the stock price anyway. Hopefully I wasn't one of the few who saw the canary dead in the mine shaft and sold the stock while it was in the low 30's and before the Dividend was cut.

"Flannery, who's been at GE since 1987, brought little, if any, vision from the outside world. What he did bring was a deep understanding of GE's corporate politics"

Pretty much sums up the problem with GE. Its all about corporate politics. Not products, not services, not talent, not customers, not innovation and not even making money. Everyday staff receive selfie embedded newsletters from the latest "leaders" jockeying for position. They are filled with empty corporate platitudes like "growth" and "innovation" delivered as if they were the first to ever consider such things. Its typically a vanilla blend of whatever buzzwords were going around 3 years ago and are now considered mainstream enough to safely present. Simply presenting them is considered equivalent to having actually accomplished something. In GE a finished PowerPoint deck about a project IS THE PROJECT. Once pitched you can move on because doing the hard work of actual execution is seen as dumb work, something "lower bands" might do. Of course the lower bands don't get to do much for long since they can't go a single quarter without having to survive a Game of Thrones style re-org, "burn the furniture for heat" cost cutting initiative, North Korean style HR culture brainwashing session, meaningless strategy pivot, new set of buggy "digital" tools, divestiture of their business or the disruptive integration of a some sad new acquisition.

My advice: sell everything, wind down the rest, and do it in a humane way that is fair to customers and employees. Of course asking a band of jackals to be humane is probably wishful thinking.