Objectivity is the casualty in ‘Lights Out,’ the damning book on GE and Jeffrey Immelt
When two Wall Street Journal reporters, whose blurb-bios say ‘writes about General Electric,’ put together a book about the company, you expect compelling, evidence-backed, insightful incisions that do justice to the name of their work, ‘Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric.’
But not much deep into the book you start wondering where exactly lies the ‘pride and delusion’ that writers Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann claim to be exposing, apart from being a unidimensional — and relentless — rant against its former Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt.
Thrilling start
‘Lights Out’ opens in vintage Jason Bourne style: a racy, thrilling read about the new chairman, John Flannery, assuming office, visiting GE Power’s office, and discovering that the business had a serious cash crunch.
Gryta and Mann are all praise for Flannery. “Flannery was self-deprecating, though possessed of a disarming confidence… Flannery was a voracious reader, his wide-ranging tastes reflected in his conversations, but he didn’t ooze arrogance as some corporate chieftains do.”
That is great story-telling technique, befitting pulp fiction. The good man pitted against the evil villain, who will soon come into the picture, and here, according to the authors, it is Immelt, whose job Flannery has just bagged.
That nail-biting read is all good until we reach the concluding lines of the chapter: .. a palm upturned, an eyebrow raised, made the incoming CEO’s thought clear to anyone in the room as he turned from the charts to the financial chief he had known for two decades. “Did you fucking know about this?”
But ‘hey, wait a minute…’
Did the authors speak to anyone who saw Flannery ‘palm upturned, an eyebrow raised?’ Did Flannery tell the authors what was in his mind then? Perhaps, writing ‘a book’ gives the authors some leeway for innocent conjecture. And that would have been fine if the two were writing a la John Grisham. But not when they embark on an informed reportage on a company that has been very much part of the US national fabric.
One-sided narrative
‘Lights Out’ deep-dives into slicing GE’s operations under Immelt, almost always grudgingly giving respect due to the man who was passed on the mantle of Chairman & CEO by the larger-than-life Jack Welsh…. and along with it, the company’s deeper, unreported, camouflaged woes.
While the slant against Immelt is more than obvious, when it comes to cultivating the same bias — that would do justice to the title — in the minds of readers through strong proof-points, the two have little new to offer. Instead, they focus on wordplay and tonality. After all, in story-telling, isn’t it the choice of words that make the difference?
For a book that must have started with the title and then worked backward, Gryta and Mann find everything that Immelt did ‘delusional’ without adding much to substantiate their claim other than the ‘fall in share price.’ That, again, would have been an admissible proof-point had not the authors stated that GE’s high credit rating owed much to GE Capital, which they then rip apart for flouting all norms that any bank should have upheld let alone ‘the seventh largest in the US.’
As HBR put it, the exit of Immelt was not the result of his ambitious reforms of the company but “activist investors. During Immelt’s tenure, GE’s stock market value fell by about half. Its stock is trading where it was 20 years ago. … Activist investors have a simple goal: increase the value of their investment. But first they need to get management of a company to change the existing strategy.”
In short, the worries of GE were far from Immelt’s pride or delusion; it had a lot to do with how GE Capital was run, which Immelt would exit as part of his strategy.
That is perhaps what any sensible CEO would have done. And that doesn’t make him delusional.
Play of words
To realise the play of words the authors use, you only need to refer to the glowing references of Walls Street Journal in the book, including the description of Drew Dowell, the newspaper’s corporate editor as “boyish and inexhaustible” and of its reporter Joann S. Lublin, “whose tenacity in wearing down corporate titans who dared to resist her inquiries about hirings, firings, coups, and deals was legendary.”
I have nothing against such patronizing. But when you parade a whole book with one-sided rant against everything that Immelt did, when they very well knew the legacy of the rot (buried under the carpet under Welch), you are tempted to ask: why this single-minded slandering?
None of the Immelt team is spared, not least Beth Comstock, the former chief marketing officer credited with creating ‘ecomagination’ and GE’s new digital-driven marketing and PR strategy. Everything she did is written out in a manner that is supposed to evoke snide in the minds of readers. Pray for what?
I found Comstock’s approach of ‘Pick a simple story… and tell it again, and again, and again’ and her belief that ‘story was strategy’ not necessarily something to be dumbed down but as often relevant to organisations such as GE that need powerful pegs to hang their ware.
Operating in a tough environment
GE’s woes, it is clear from the book, weren’t the result of Immelt’s pride; those were most pointedly the legacy of Welsh, undiscussed when he was chairing the company, as well as the new economic environment GE had to operate: from the Sept. 11 attacks to the 2007/8 global financial crisis, the newfound rigor in governmental scrutiny, and the headwinds that older corporates had to face in an increasingly digitizing world.
To his credit, Immelt thrust GE into the digital world; he helped navigate the company through its toughest years, and if you measure his legacy against share prices, it does great injustice to the man, who helped keep a company standing by taking some of the toughest decisions that not many would have had the spine to do.
As Immelt noted in his HBR piece, “I subscribe to the words of the great philosopher Mike Tyson, who said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” It is so difficult to predict events. It is difficult to sustain transformation during tough times, but it’s the only way to create a better future.”
The relentless tirade against the man with choice of words that seek to vilify, and a clearly one-sided, patronizing tune for others, goes against the fundamental principle of journalism and reportage: Objectivity.
At the end of some 350 plus pages of Lights Out, I am none the wiser about the authors’ inference that Immelt’s pride dragged down the company: on the contrary, I hold Immelt in greater admiration for taking tough measures that were (and as is being proven now) the best bet for a company caught in dire straits for machinations (at Capital) that have little to do with the man.
And what a case study it would have made, if only the book had focused on how Immelt led the company through choppiest waters and left behind a company that now under the new chairman, H. Lawrence Culp, Jr., is being further moulded as a leaner, more efficient, profitable company.
Isn’t that just what Immelt did in the first place?
Lights Out, however, offers some fascinating anecdotes, including GE’s brand transformation from ‘We Bring Good Things to Life’ to ‘Imagination at Work’ … and (untold in the book) now to ‘Building a World that Works.’ There are also interesting insider stories you may not want to miss as well as references to how GE evolved its FastWorks and industrial internet models.
But most and all of this are written with Immelt-bashing blinkers on by the authors, so for the reader, the key is to cast aside those prejudices.
A more balanced narrative, giving credit where it was due would have made Lights Out one to store not, as it now stands, to be read and tossed aside.
ENDS
NB: I do not work at GE and I am not paid to write this
