Cutthroat capitalism existed long before Jack, that top reddit comment is quite the thing. Carnegie was a wanker, Ford was a wanker, Sloan, the list could go on and on.
I teach business all day every day and I only reach for Jack to teach "Fix, Sell, or Close" - In terms of clinical business he was right, in order to focus fully on the customer, the business units need to be empowered and pushed to be 1 or 2 in their given segment. They should have all the resource and time they need to focus fully on the customer problems. Out of the 70s GE had become quite unwieldy, he did a great job of re-focusing the resources where they could be best used.
I also think talking to how they engineered their finances without looking at the whole picture is a bit unfair. GE was in a bad place when he took over, it was way over extended doing a meh job generally. He surly needed cash to 1. refocus the business 2. expand research and innovation into the areas left (jets and healthcare primarily) 3. implement a large scale global expansion.
Should you do channel stuffing or bill and hold? No. Even worse: when you blur it into your reporting, that is just asking for SEC enforcement. Is there a better way to do it? Yes. Were they being sloppy? Yes. If it really was part of saving GE, should they have done it? Well, I'll leave that to you dear reader. :)
Not wrong, but then he (post-retirement) says things like:
> Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."[67]
Given his actions as CEO, what he says (above) and what he actually did, there's some kind of disconnect (unless he had some kind of 'conversion' in retirement).
Perhaps when he was actually still at GE, but after his retirement, it is now know that GE did all sorts of 'sideways accounting':
* https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...
So he is no longer viewed as highly as he once was:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/vqr30e/jack_...