Jack Welch: the company he's now keeping
The New York Times story (registration required) on Jack Welch's continuing problems starts with a reference to a recent Wharton School conference that addressed the "once-soaring corporate captains" who "have crashed to earth" -- Kenneth Lay, Bernard Ebbers and, yes, Jack Welch.
A close friend of Mr. Welch, who said he spoke to him last week, said Mr. Welch was deeply upset that G.E.'s reputation was being affected by the revelations about his benefits and also said the G.E. board was particularly angered that Mrs. Welch had revealed the details of the agreement, which had been kept secret from G.E. shareholders.
Meanwhile, a close friend of Mrs. Welch said that before the pay package was revealed, she turned down a $20 million offer on grounds that it was an insulting amount from a man said to be worth $900 million.
...Even before the recent revelations, Mr. Welch left G.E. more with a whimper than a bang. A proposed $45 billion takeover of Honeywell was blocked as his tenure was about to end. It fell victim, many say, to Mr. Welch's underestimating the concerns of the European Union and an arrogance that the European regulators did not count for much.
More fundamentally, especially in the wake of recent accounting scandals, many are now raising questions about the quality of G.E.'s earnings under Mr. Welch and wonder whether the company manipulated earnings so that G.E. would show the same level of growth and reach its earnings targets year after year. Many say G.E. used one-time sales — it acquired and sold more than 100 companies a year in deals arranged by its financial arm, GE Capital — to smooth the ups and downs of its industrial products divisions.