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That quote above, which is from this newsletter, is no doubt a little bit simplistic — lots of things made the “middle class” a harder concept to grasp, including the rise of management consultants — but it’s not entirely wrong either. What’s funny to me is the underpinning of it, though: lots of people deify Jack Welch as some amazing business mind and savior of companies, but in reality, was he? They called him “Neutron Jack” because he laid off so many people. (Neutron bombs kill everything inside, but keep the basic structure intact, or so I understand.) There are entire swaths of people who hate GE because of what he did to their grandfather back in the day. Plus: his business mind wasn’t even that sharp. He was great at short-term-ism, which I suppose is really all you need to be an executive nowadays anyway, but long-term he had no plan. He over-relied on the financial division instead of the old -school “we make stuff still” approach, and then that got exposed during the 2008 crash, and now GE is equivalent to a penny stock relative to where it was. And we laud this guy? Why, exactly?
It reflects a broader trend, especially in America, whereby it seems like we gravitate towards things that decimate us. We love tech. I know women in their 30s who still spend 3+ hours/day on Instagram, and some of these women have very-credible-sounding jobs, up to and including…
