Jack Welch

His father punched tickets on the Boston & Maine and his mother kept the house in Peabody, Massachusetts, and their only child spent his summers caddying, delivering papers, selling shoes and running a drill press. He took a chemical engineering degree at the University of Massachusetts and a doctorate at Illinois, and in 1960 General Electric hired him into a plastics operation in Pittsfield for 10,500 dollars a year. Within a year he had lined up another job, because his raise was identical to everyone else's and the bureaucracy disgusted him. An executive named Reuben Gutoff talked him out of it by promising him a small company inside the large one. In 1963 an explosion took the roof off the plant Welch was running and nearly ended the career.

He became chief executive in 1981 at 45, the youngest in the company's history, and told a New York audience that year that GE would grow fast in a slow-growth economy, a speech now read as the opening of the shareholder-value era. Any business that was not first or second in its market got sold. GE went from 411,000 employees at the end of 1980 to 299,000 at the end of 1985, and the press named him Neutron Jack, after the weapon that leaves the buildings standing. He fired the bottom 10 percent of his managers every year regardless of what they had actually achieved. He bought RCA for 6.28 billion dollars in 1986 and pushed the company into finance until GE Capital produced 40 percent of revenue. Revenue quintupled. He left in 2001.

Under Welch, GE fought the Environmental Protection Agency and New York State for 20 years over the polychlorinated biphenyls its capacitor plant had put into the Hudson River at Hudson Falls. The chemicals contaminated the aquifer beneath the plant past the point where the water could be drunk untreated, and the state told people not to eat fish from the river near the site. Welch called the accusation vastly overstated and disputed the scientists who classified PCBs as forever chemicals. The other bill arrived at home. In 2002 his wife Jane Beasley learned of his involvement with Suzy Wetlaufer, then editing the Harvard Business Review, and told the magazine, which forced Wetlaufer out. Beasley's divorce filings then made public the lifetime perks GE had promised him, and he renounced them.

He died of kidney failure at his New York home on March 1, 2020, and was buried out of St. Patrick's Cathedral. By then the argument about him had turned over. GE's market capitalization had fallen roughly 55 percent in the two decades after he left, a 100,000-dollar investment made in 2000 was worth about a fifth of that by 2021, and in late 2021 the company announced it would break itself into three. David Gelles titled his 2022 book The Man Who Broke Capitalism. GE itself had already abandoned the forced ranking Welch made famous. His last public act of consequence was a 2012 tweet accusing the Obama administration of falsifying the unemployment numbers, a charge nobody ever proved.

Jack Welch's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Growing fast in a slow-growth economy speech
  The New York speech often treated as the dawn of the shareholder-value movement 1981
• The vitality curve other
  Rank and yank — the bottom 10 percent of managers fired every year 1981
• The RCA acquisition company
  6.28 billion dollars, the largest non-oil merger to that date. GE kept NBC and sold the rest. 1986
• Jack: Straight from the Gut book
  Written with John A. Byrne 2001
• Winning book
  Written with Suzy Welch. Number one on the Wall Street Journal list. 2005
• Jack Welch Management Institute company
  An online MBA programme, later acquired by Strayer University 2009

• November 19, 1935 aged 0 Born at Peabody, Massachusetts, the only child of a railroad conductor
• 1960 aged ~25 Joins GE in Pittsfield as a junior chemical engineer at 10,500 dollars
• 1961 aged ~26 Nearly quits over a standard raise, and Reuben Gutoff talks him into staying
• 1963 aged ~28 An explosion blows the roof off the factory he manages He was almost fired for it.
• 1981 aged ~46 Becomes GE's youngest chairman and chief executive at 45 He succeeded Reginald H. Jones.
• 1985 aged ~50 GE ends the year with 299,000 employees, down from 411,000 in 1980 Of the 112,000 gone, 81,000 were in businesses GE kept.
• 1986 aged ~51 Buys RCA for 6.28 billion dollars
• 2001 aged ~66 Retires and hands the company to Jeff Immelt
• March 1, 2020 aged 84 Dies of kidney failure at his home in New York, at 84

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