What happened to GE? Simple. Jack Welch killed the golden goose. During his tenure he shifted focus and money away from long-term R&D in the name of boosting quarterly profits. Product development took a back seat to selling "services", i.e. focus more on selling contracts around maintaining your turbines than you do on developing and manufacturing good turbines in the first place. I won't even get into the heavy borrowing and use of GE Capital to turn the company into a casino that happens to make a few things on the side.
Put another way, if you took every shortsighted MBA-driven business fad of the 80's and 90's and turned it into a person, you'd get Jack Welch. Sadly, his methods were very very good at juicing short to medium term profits, so firms all over the U.S. were quick to copy his methods, which did more damage to American innovation than any foreign power could dream of.
Put another way, if you took every shortsighted MBA-driven business fad of the 80's and 90's and turned it into a person, you'd get Jack Welch. Sadly, his methods were very very good at juicing short to medium term profits, so firms all over the U.S. were quick to copy his methods, which did more damage to American innovation than any foreign power could dream of.