Often-engrossing account of the unraveling of General Electric Co. . . . rich anecdotes of what transpired in the boardroom and how these captains of industry doomed what was once a great company.”

Its 127-year history was marked by revolutionary technologies, immense profit, and now, alleged fraud. Chances are those old enough to remember General Electric as a success story will think of refrigerators and stoves when they think of the company. Hospital management technology was another field GE could have pioneered, Grewal suggests, since the company was, and is, a top producer of medical equipment such as CAT scanners. Dr. Charles P. Steinmetz chief consulting engineer of the General Electric Company, is showing broken porcelain insulators and pieces of a tree limb to Thomas A. Edison, which a few minutes before he had shattered with his artificial lightning making machine in his laboratory at the General Electric Plant in Schenectady, NY. NY Daily News Archive/Getty

Cohan doesn’t fall into idol-worship of Welch. He admires his leadership, but gives lots of room for Welch’s detractors. Cohan is meticulous in documenting Welch’s failures both professionally and personally. Cohan falls a bit into the weeds in the second half of the book, writing detailed histories of bit players - several figures are introduced with long and detailed histories that seem disproportionate to their role in the book. hear about the new scrutiny of business by Sarbanes-Oxley following the crash and burn of Enron and Bernie Ebbers WorldCom. These were big events. The New Yorker Best Books of 2022 • Financial Times Best Books of 2022 • The Economist Best Books of 2022

The last few chapters are the aftermath of Immelt’s actions, and the unwinding of the company after his firing. Cohan does an excellent job of articulating how complex a task it was, and how much of a mess John Flannery inherited. Cohan has no time for current CEO Larry Culp. A magisterial history of the astounding rise - and unimaginable fall - of America's most iconic corporation That’s why I was eager to read Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric, by the Wall Street Journal reporters Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann. I wanted to understand what really went wrong and what lessons this story holds for investors, regulators, business leaders, and business students. With GE announcing a breakup on Tuesday into three separate, publicly traded companies, after years of retrenching and selling off businesses, Grewal spoke with me about the end of a great American enterprise and what it was like to lead technology teams at the core of the most respected multi-industry conglomerate in history for 25 years. Good investment decisions dictate diversification as a balance against the lows of the business cycle. Welchification insisted on being at the top of every business. It is theoretically impossible, but made good sense to the EPS crowd.Cohan’s real scorn is reserved for the Board of Directors though. Several times he piles blame for the decline of the company on them, and it’s hard to disagree. Almost all of the board members declined to be interviewed for the book, and I imagine a few of them regret that decision. He ends with a direct shot at the board for enriching Culp at the expense of the shareholders. One of his most famous talents was to deliver a steady — some would say “managed” — stream of earnings. He gave the illusion that growth was a given even when he himself could see that business was cyclical. One prominent critic of the company pointed to this hubris as part of the company’s failure: It didn’t follow appropriate safeguards because of its name, history, size and past success.

Cohan was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 20, 1960. His father was an accountant and his mother worked in administration. In 2018, GE—the last original component of the DJIA—was dropped from the index, after years of poor performance and declining revenues. There is a long section on the process to choose the next CEO. To be honest, the whole section sounds more like a dull Games of Thrones episode than a company choosing its next CEO and is spelt out in too much detail, including detailed bio's of all the candidates. There is a hubris to the whole description, especially when considering at the same time the 2000 presidential election was going on with the Florida recounts.MARK SEAL, author of Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather One of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing is because during the days I was in the headquarters, I was visiting all Silicon Valley companies, Boston companies, trying to stay at the leading edge of what was coming from all these people so that we could bring it in,” said Grewal, whose team met with Steve Jobs at Apple, among many others. ‘It did not have to be this’ Contrary to my expectations, I really enjoyed reading Power Failure. Despite its length, it is not a difficult read and the story that it weaves is, at least as far as sagas about the corporate world can be, fascinating.

General Electric. " GE Plans to Reduce Quarterly Dividend in Conjunction with Revised Capital Allocation Framework." Like managers of sports teams, CEOs can unfairly get the credit when things are going great, and also earn unfair blame when things go wrong. So it doesn’t make sense to attribute all the ups and downs of a company, or even its long term success, to the actions of one person.I have a pet theory about what’s really wrong with these United States: too many banks. Or, more precisely, too many bankers at too many institutions that aren’t banks but act like banks, abandoning their core missions to concentrate on banking or banking-adjacent activities.