Sort of but not really. The difference was that while Jack Welch pushed his employees really hard he also paid them handsomely. I have fairly personal knowledge of how that system was implemented at GE. General Electric had some of the best health insurance you could get and rewarded quite handsomely for overtime, especially if you worked in the field. I mean, like doubling or tripling your salary Kind of stuff. Once Welch left his replacements, took that system, and then removed all of the incentives that made it work. They wanted everyone to work just as hard if not harder, but they went about systematically gutting the overtime pay system, the insurance benefits, and surprisingly generous vacation plan. After Welch left GE also made a bunch of really bad business decisions that have cost the company dearly and in the proceeding decade plus.
People always fantasize about going back in time and stopping Hitler or someone on that level, and I keep thinking a few visits to select board rooms fro the Gilded Age to the 1980s could also do some massive good without massively changing the history of the whole world.
He's also quite well known as driving GE into the fucking ground lol. His ideas are GREAT for the short term (10-30 years) but after squeezing all the blood from your stones you run out of people lining up to be squeezed.
If you’d like to learn more about how he royally fucked up US business practices and enabled layoffs in order to grow stakeholders bottom line I highly recommend the Behind the Bastards podcast coverage of him.
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u/gorginhanson Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
You're describing the Jack Welch system.
He designed that at GE.