Reseña de Power Failure por Josh

This is an excellent history of GE, albeit a clearly biased one. I'm giving it four stars instead of five because Cohan's focus on scandals and stupidity makes it seem like he has an ax to grind which, which makes him less than perfectly reliable narrator.

The book's depiction of Jeff Immelt is particularly damning. He lacked basically all of the skills one would want a CEO of a large company to have. He was a middling salesman who had no idea how to manage people, allocate capital, or make important decisions. He spent most of his time worrying about the stock and trying to manage earnings to hit the next quarter's targets and pump up the short term value of the stock. When anything went wrong his solution was to find a scapegoat and fire them.

His predecessor, Jack Welch, comes off as competent but, like Immelt, focused intensely on short term results. As Cohan discusses, Welch's record was helped immensely by the discovery of what was, essentially, a rate arbitrage opportunity. GE Capital could take advantage of GE's low cost of capital (thanks to it's AAA credit rating) to leveraged the company up which, with even moderately competent performance, inevitably provided a big boost to GE's earnings but also significantly increased it's risk profile and complexity leaving Jeff with something that was far too complex for him to manage.