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    Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric
    Unavailable
    Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric
    Unavailable
    Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric
    Ebook493 pages8 hours

    Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric

    By Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER
    "If you’re in any kind of leadership role—whether at a company, a non-profit, or somewhere else—there’s a lot you can learn here."—Bill Gates,     Gates Notes

    How could General Electric—perhaps America’s most iconic corporation—suffer such a swift and sudden fall from grace?

    This is the definitive history of General Electric’s epic decline, as told by the two Wall Street Journal reporters who covered its fall.

    Since its founding in 1892, GE has been more than just a corporation. For generations, it was job security, a solidly safe investment, and an elite business education for top managers.

    GE electrified America, powering everything from lightbulbs to turbines, and became fully integrated into the American societal mindset as few companies ever had. And after two decades of leadership under legendary CEO Jack Welch, GE entered the twenty-first century as America’s most valuable corporation. Yet, fewer than two decades later, the GE of old was gone.

    ​Lights Out examines how Welch’s handpicked successor, Jeff Immelt, tried to fix flaws in Welch’s profit machine, while stumbling headlong into mistakes of his own. In the end, GE’s traditional win-at-all-costs driven culture seemed to lose its direction, which ultimately caused the company’s decline on both a personal and organizational scale. Lights Out details how one of America’s all-time great companies has been reduced to a cautionary tale for our times.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMariner Books
    Release dateJul 21, 2020
    ISBN9780358243571
    Author

    Thomas Gryta

    THOMAS GRYTA writes about General Electric for the Wall Street Journal. Previously he covered the telecommunications industry for the Journal and was a Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University. In prior work around the newsroom he covered the biotechnology industry and did general assignment reporting and copyediting. Gryta studied history at the University of Massachusetts, including a year in Germany. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and three children.  

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    Reviews for Lights Out

    4.5/5

    33 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A gripping tale of the downfall one of the most revered and iconic company of the world. Misplaced priorities n untimely strategic decisions and belief that they can never be wrong and the company is to big to fail was its undoing
    • 4/5
      Liked the book it was interesting and it shows you a little bit into the corporate world and how a few people have power to do and un do

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I’m not a business book fan but I really think everyone should read this book. It’s good reporting and fair assessment of the fall of an American institution. More importantly for me, it makes me love Jack Donaghy of 30 Rock even more.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I noticed that a number of present and former GE employees gave this book a high rating so I can feel comfortable that the author did his research and due diligence in telling the story. Maybe it was just me, but I found the telling of the story a bit "dry." To be fair there were a number of anecdotes but this read like a textbook in parts. Also GE appeared to be a fairly buttoned up organization, especially under Immelt. There were a few "scandals" but nothing that severely impacted the future of the company. Mistakes were primarily bad financial and strategic decisions. Based on this book, I would remove any thought of adding Jack Welsh to the business CEO Mt Rushmore class.

      Good textbook for business students; so-so read for the general reader.

      1 person found this helpful