A sweeping tale of ambition, arrogance, egos, and feuds—and how they brought down a once-great company.
A business journalist traces the rise and fall of General Electric, the company that once exemplified American business.
There was a time when GE, a key player in the electricity revolution that powered America in the 20th century, was a leader in innovation and acumen, a reputation that persisted into the postwar era as it became a diversified conglomerate. Now there are only scattered fragments and a broken reputation. In this hefty study, Cohan, a former investment banker who has written multiple books on finance and Wall Street, delves into the records of the company’s early days, but he also presents the results of his interviews with CEOs of the modern era: Jack Welch, Jeff Immelt, and John Flannery. The current CEO, Larry Culp, declined to participate. Welch’s drive took the company into new areas, but his tenure was also problematic. GE’s strength was always industrial operations, but Welch moved it into media and financial services, using its internal bank GE Capital as the springboard. Welch picked Immelt as his successor but later said that the choice was a mistake. Immelt, for his part, claims that he spent much of his tenure cleaning up disasters that Welch swept under the rug (all of which he covers in detail in his 2021 memoir, Hot Seat). By the time Welch stepped down in 2001, the company had become dangerously overextended. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the corporation’s myriad weaknesses, and a painful period of sell-offs began. Flannery tried to bring order to the chaos with a proposal for radical restructuring, but he was fired after only 15 months. This is a long, complicated story, and there are times when Cohan struggles to keep the sprawling cast of squabbling characters organized. As he capably shows, all of GE’s leaders made mistakes, but there was also a pervasive sense of hubris. Would-be corporate titans, take note.
A sweeping tale of ambition, arrogance, egos, and feuds—and how they brought down a once-great company.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-08416-8
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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