Boeing's shakeup and GE's fall: 2 more black eyes for Jack Welch's legacy
This week, Dave Calhoun, an acolyte of the late Jack Welch, the legendary longtime chief executive of General Electric, said he was quitting as chief executive of Boeing, joining the list of unsuccessful Welch disciple CEOs.
And Welch’s legacy will disappear when General Electric’s name vanishes from the list of publicly traded US stocks on Tuesday. That’s when GE, which spun off GE HealthCare last year, will split itself into GE Vernova and GE Aerospace.
The combination of Calhoun quitting, the end of the conglomerate, and General Electric’s name disappearing tells us a lot about how the world has changed since Welch was worshiped by the likes of Fortune Magazine (which named him the Manager of the Century in 1999) and the Financial Times (which named GE “The World’s Most Respected Company” for the third straight year in 2000, the year before Welch stepped down as CEO).
I wrote about the end of Welch’s legacy last year after Larry Culp, who became GE’s CEO in 2018, announced plans to split the company into three pieces, none of which would be named General Electric. As the Welch hagiography died down, the mess left behind showed that his genius was as much in playing accounting games as anything else.
