Ed Zitron: Newsletter: The Shareholder Supremacy has eaten the world, turning the tech industry into the playground of do-nothing management dictators that see human beings as assets and the customer as subordinate to growth - all inspired by GE’s Jack Welch. www.wheresyoured.at/tss/

Newsletter: The Shareholder Supremacy has eaten the world, turning the tech industry into the playground of do-nothing management dictators that see human beings as assets and the customer as subordinate to growth - all inspired by GE’s Jack Welch. www.wheresyoured.at/tss/

The Shareholder Supremacywww.wheresyoured.at I promise you, everything that's happening makes sense. It all feels so chaotic, so utterly, offensively stupid, so disconnected from reality that it's hard to understand how Meta can run a terrible company with decaying services that's also wildly profitable, or how Meta, Microsoft and Google can proliferate unprofitable, unsustainable

In 1916, the Michigan Supreme Court, in demanding Ford stop cutting costs and raising wages, expressed a non-binding legal opinion that the interests of shareholders should always take precedence over anything else. It's inspired a hundred years of rot. wheresyoured.at/tss/

Thus began the Shareholder Supremacy, a financial death cult disconnected from production and humanity itself, a continual shell game where companies do things not to produce an outcome in real life, but to manipulate investors and the markets themselves. wheresyoured.at/tss/

Shareholder Supremacy really took root when a man called Jack Welch joined General Electric as a junior engineer, eventually becoming a manager who pushed his people so hard he literally blew up a factory. wheresyoured.at/tss/

Jack Welch was eventually in line to become GE's new CEO, and realized the company could save money by laying people off - at the time considered a last resort - creating the modern-day culture of profit-centric layoffs that end thousands of careers. wheresyoured.at/tss/

Welch would become CEO of GE in 1981, and in two years would lay off over 72,000 people, inventing "stack ranking" where the bottom 10% is culled every quarter. Jack Welch is a corporate war criminal responsible for ruining millions of people's lives. wheresyoured.at/tss/

However, Jack Welch's real legacy was in how he manipulated his stock, constantly buying and selling companies, turning GE Credit into a giant unregulated bank, and laying off thousands as a means of meeting analyst targets and boosting its stock price. wheresyoured.at/tss/

this was good, ed

Ugh

This is definitely grim, but an excellent read. I always enjoy feeling how fired up about something you are through the words.

Great read. Explains perfectly how profits and GDP soar while life for most of us is getting worse.

Fantastic writing! Finally explained to me the idiot tactics of a boss I had who kept Welch's book on his desk.

OK, I must read before I, reply, but the shareholder supremacy is wayyyyyy older than that (I'd have to look my shit up though, to be fair. Been a long time since I studied economics!)

Fuck Jack Welch all my homies hate Jack Welch

Excellent newsletter this week, Ed! Amazing deep dive.

Brilliant look at how companies have turned the idea of a Minimum Viable product into, once successful, a Least Viable Product. I'm also including this in my research on what I'm calling New Modernism, a response to the fracturing of society thanx to capitalism akin to Modernism's birth from WWI.

Thank you for helping it make a little more sense.

Yep. My dad was an engineer at GE and helped design the Apollo lunar landing module. He left to start his own company but colleagues who remained were let go just before retirement or took early retirement reduced benefits. Thanks to Jack Welch.

good job on continuously reposting this btw. Too few people understand how this platform works - that great content like this needs to be shared multiple times to reach people online at different times. This time it finally caught me.

Amazing piece, and *thank you* for turning me toward David Gelles’ book 🙏

📌

Very good. Thanks for writing all this stuff.

Let's not forget that Jack Welch was a horrible person in his personal life as well.

Always thought Friedman had an outsized part in this story too. Hard to see around freshwater mathiness leading directly to fraud (and the 80s junk-bond LBOs). Product Managers tagged because of the structural position of the role. It is a nexus of control: attractive to power seekers.

Someone needs to prioritize and should speak for the customer. Engineers often too detail focused to put tasks in a market/business context. Deming's model shows a different way Capitalism could be, where the environment, workers, and communities matter just as much as the owners, shareholders.

He did but the piece was already 11k

I'd have read more. I already had a dislike of Welch, coming up in Microsoft where his practices were adored long after they stopped being practiced at GE. Learning he started in Plastics makes him worse.

Capitalism go extra brrr last couple decades

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I was hoping Taylor might make an appearance, but we can't have everything, and this was a lot. Thank you.

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