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David Gelles
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The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy Kindle Edition

by David Gelles (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.3 out of 5 stars 941 ratings
New York Times Bestseller

New York Times reporter and “Corner Office” columnist David Gelles reveals legendary GE CEO Jack Welch to be the root of all that’s wrong with capitalism today and offers advice on how we might right those wrongs.

In 1981, Jack Welch took over General Electric and quickly rose to fame as the first celebrity CEO. He golfed with presidents, mingled with movie stars, and was idolized for growing GE into the most valuable company in the world. But Welch’s achievements didn’t stem from some greater intelligence or business prowess. Rather, they were the result of a sustained effort to push GE’s stock price ever higher, often at the expense of workers, consumers, and innovation. In this captivating, revelatory book, David Gelles argues that Welch single-handedly ushered in a new, cutthroat era of American capitalism that continues to this day.

Gelles chronicles Welch’s campaign to vaporize hundreds of thousands of jobs in a bid to boost profits, eviscerating the country’s manufacturing base, and destabilizing the middle class. Welch’s obsession with downsizing—he eliminated 10% of employees every year—fundamentally altered GE and inspired generations of imitators who have employed his strategies at other companies around the globe. In his day, Welch was corporate America’s leading proponent of mergers and acquisitions, using deals to gobble up competitors and giving rise to an economy that is more concentrated and less dynamic. And Welch pioneered the dark arts of “financialization,” transforming GE from an admired industrial manufacturer into what was effectively an unregulated bank. The finance business was hugely profitable in the short term and helped Welch keep GE’s stock price ticking up. But ultimately, financialization undermined GE and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies.

Gelles shows how Welch’s celebrated emphasis on increasing shareholder value by any means necessary (layoffs, outsourcing, offshoring, acquisitions, and buybacks, to name but a few tactics) became the norm in American business generally. He demonstrates how that approach has led to the greatest socioeconomic inequality since the Great Depression and harmed many of the very companies that have embraced it. And he shows how a generation of Welch acolytes radically transformed companies like Boeing, Home Depot, Kraft Heinz, and more. Finally, Gelles chronicles the change that is now afoot in corporate America, highlighting companies and leaders who have abandoned Welchism and are proving that it is still possible to excel in the business world without destroying livelihoods, gutting communities, and spurning regulation.
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  1. Print length
    271 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Simon & Schuster
  4. Publication date
    31 May 2022
  5. File size
    2.9 MB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
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  1. Welchism has at its heart the conviction that companies must prioritize profits for shareholders above all else, that executives are entitled to enormous wealth and minimal accountability, and that everyday employees deserve nothing more than their last paycheck.
    Highlighted by 364 Kindle readers
  2. Welch employed three main tools in his crusade: downsizing, dealmaking, and financialization.
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  3. We put our chief executives up on pedestals, granting them wide latitude to influence our national discourse and endowing them with vast wealth while absolving them of accountability.
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Review

“A vigorous argument for a more humane capitalism.” –Kirkus Reviews

“An indispensable history of how we wound up with a business culture that believed employees were owed nothing more than yesterday's paycheck. But David Gelles does not just sound the alarm. He contrasts this warped world view with a new emerging reality — accelerated by the pandemic — that puts the employee experience and well-being at the center of business priorities. A must read for anyone who wants to say goodbye forever to a toxic chapter of American capitalism.” —Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive

“In vivid prose and reporting that lights up each page, Gelles probes how Jack Welch influenced a generation of business leaders to ignore the feelings of employees and the malign impact of corporate mergers, and how decisions made today might strangle a company’s long-term health. This powerful book shows why GE and so many companies run by Welch’s disciples have badly stumbled, along with Welch's reputation.” —Ken Auletta, author of Hollywood Ending

“A compelling indictment of short-termism that offers an urgent call for business leaders at all levels to be responsible and care. Gelles clearly makes the case that business is more than for profit and that it is by doing good that you can do well, and provides us a roadmap for the way forward. An indispensable read for our time.” —Hubert Joly, former Chairman and CEO Best Buy, author The Heart of Business

“Jack Welch is one of the more important political and business leaders in modern American history. His strategies destroyed a once-great company, and more broadly, he helped pave the way for the destruction of the American middle class and the erosion of American democracy. For years, the business press has lauded Welch's visionary spirit, but few reporters have ever asked what that vision was. With The Man Who Broke Capitalism, David Gelles has delivered a book that explains what we can learn from a man like Welch, as we try to restore the shattered society he left behind.” —Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

“A robust and necessary portrait of a complex figure. A lesson in shareholder value vs. stakeholder value that will only become more relevant in the coming years.” —Scott Galloway, New York Times bestselling author and serial entrepreneur

“A provocative page-turner that exposes the dark truths about Jack Welch, America's first celebrity CEO. After building a sprawling global empire through unmanageable mergers, shady accounting, and heartless downsizing, with undue veneration, and countless imitators, it's good to see Welch finally cut down to size.” —Jennifer Taub, author of Big Dirty Money

About the Author

David Gelles is the “Corner Office” columnist and a business reporter for the New York Times. Since joining the Times in 2013, he has written about CEOs, finance, technology, media, and more. He was part of the team that covered the fallout from the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max jets, work that won the 2020 Gerald Loeb Award for Breaking News Reporting. A student of Buddhism and a meditator for more than twenty years, David is an authority on the intersection of mindfulness and the business world. His 2015 book, Mindful Work: How Meditation is Changing Business from the Inside Out, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Before joining the Times, he was a reporter for the Financial Times.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09JPKVQV2
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (31 May 2022)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2.9 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 271 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 941 ratings

About the author

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David Gelles

David Gelles

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David Gelles is a bestselling author and a climate correspondent for The New York Times. At the Times, he leads the Climate Forward newsletter and event series, and is a regular contributor to coverage about business, the environment, politics and more. His new book, "Dirtbag Billionaire," reveals how Yvon Chouinard turned Patagonia into one of the world's most remarkable companies. His previous book, "The Man Who Broke Capitalism," uncovered how Jack Welch ushered in the era of shareholder primacy, and was an instant New York Times bestseller. His first book, "Mindful Work," explored the growing influence of meditation in the workplace. He has won EMMY, Gerald Loeb and SABEW awards for his work, and is based in New York City.

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4.3 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from India

  • Kindle Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Just one word. Awesome.
    Reviewed in India on 9 August 2022
    Verified Purchase
    Dude, this book is damn awesome. Ignore at your own peril. I learnt the entire history through 80s till present from this book. Delighted. No words to express my gratitude.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Kindle Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Hubris gone mad
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 September 2024
    Verified Purchase
    Excellent book. Jack Welch clearly not the hero made out to be. So focused on finance tricks. No way possible to get 30+ profitable quarters
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  • Joao C. R. Previdi
    5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente
    Reviewed in Brazil on 26 March 2023
    Verified Purchase
    De recriador só capitalismo americano a um dos responsáveis pela especulação de 2008, vale ser lido
    Report
  • Marion N.
    5.0 out of 5 stars The hazards of profit-first ideology
    Reviewed in the United States on 20 June 2022
    Verified Purchase
    One good thing about being stuck in Covid quarantine (mild case: 3 days of fever but no other symptoms for the last 5 days), is that I got to read this book. I think it is hugely important and makes a compelling, if depressingly realistic, case for how corporate profit-first ideology has badly damaged American democracy.

    I’m a fan of David Gelles, who writes for the Times about corporate malfeasance. I’ve also been interested in Jack Welch since I read an article in Fortune magazine about how a speech he gave in 2001 was responsible for kicking off the Shareholder Value movement.

    This was the push to give stockholders immediate higher returns on investment and made growth in profits the sole corporate goal (a big shift from blue chip stocks like IBM, which promised slow but steady returns over a long time period).

    Gelles explains what this did to corporations and what they then did to America. Companies like Welch’s General Electric, which made toasters and household electrics, fired employees, outsourced labor, cut all possible costs, merged and acquired, manipulated earnings, and forgot about ethics let alone social responsibility. Boeing, infamously, did the same. Hence plane crasshes and deaths.

    Other results: destruction of the environment, loss of manufacturing, and the evaporation of decent working- and middle class incomes and the transfer of their wealth to stockholders and especially to corporate executives. Hence their obscene salaries and compensation.

    Gelles also describes the widespread acceptance of profits first, the ignoring of its consequences, and the collusion of Wall Street and the government in this destructive system.

    Food companies are no exception. I have long attributed the push to sell ultraprocessed junk food—regardless of its health consequences—as a result of what Jack Welch started.

    Interestingly, Gelles cites a food company, Unilever, as an example of a corporation that is trying to put social values back in the picture.

    He says others should follow Unilever’s example, and cites the 2019 statements by the World Economic Forum and the Business Roundtable to suggest that maybe business is finally catching on to the need for change. (See my incredulous post on these statements)

    I think he may be too optimistic. As he admits on page 223, this is what actually happened during the pandemic:

    One study showed that companies that signed the Business Roundtable statement were actually more likely to announce layoffs in the first months of the pandemic than companies that didn’t sign the statement, and that the companies that pledged to serve all stakeholders actually distributed more of their profits to shareholders than those who didn’t publicly pledge to look out for the common good.

    So much for promises.

    As a Lancet Commission said early in 2019, if we want social values to matter in business, government is going to have to start regulating. For that to happen, we need much greater demand from civil society.

    This book makes a strong case for the need to change the way corporations operate. Let’s get to work.
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  • Attila
    5.0 out of 5 stars Super Buch
    Reviewed in Germany on 23 April 2024
    Verified Purchase
    Es war sehr interessant zu lesen, wie ein grosser damals mächtiger Mann wie Herr Welch durch den Autor entmachtet wurde.
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  • Classics Lover
    5.0 out of 5 stars Very informative
    Reviewed in Canada on 18 December 2024
    Verified Purchase
    Gave this as a gift to someone who reads a lot of business books. He loved it.
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