, Columnist
The Collapse of GE’s House of Debt Was 130 Years Coming
The credit conditions that led to the Gilded Age conglomerate’s rise have flipped around, and not even Jack Welch’s shareholder audacity could hide the underlying reality forever.
Jack Welch missed the point of what GE had always been about.
Photographer: Michael Springer/Bloomberg
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Genius, the inventor Thomas Edison once said, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. He might have added: In business, it’s also almost 100% commercialization.
That’s a final lesson for General Electric Co., the industrial conglomerate Edison helped found that’s being split into three after nearly 130 years — as well as for Toshiba Corp., once effectively GE’s Japanese unit and now also considering a division into three separate businesses.