Extreme focus on the stock price and thus highly short term thinking. The accountants run the show and try to aggressively cut costs at every corner which works really well in the short term, but over time the company gets decimated and nobody can take the bigger product risks that allow a company to continue to evolve.
tl;dr: Keep cutting costs way past the point where it kills the ability to innovate, maintain quality, or survive an unexpected shift in the business. Cover that with low-bidder outsourcing until that fails. Meanwhile hit the talk shows (on media where your company is an advertiser), have a book ghostwritten, and buy naming rights to a business school. Have your acolytes form a cult (Lean Six Sigma) with toxic group dynamics ("black belt" inquisitors and "green belt" minions vs everyone else).
This doesn't sound the world I live in. There's been insane innovation over the last 50 years. I don't think we can say that what you describe is common.
That's because businesses that innovate, or that have consistent high quality, don't operate like GE did under Jack Welch. Reverence for him and his supposed management principles is still commonplace, though not as much as in the 1990s.
He was dubbed "Neutron Jack" (a reference to the Neutron Bomb) for eliminating employees while leaving buildings intact. He was the main reason USA lost its manufacturing base and completely screwed up how Management was/is practiced.
The US commercial environment experienced a bit of a step change in 1971 - and, realistically, probably a lead up of pressure before that date.
A bit of systems thinking and it is probably not fair to say he is "the main reason". He was the first executive who figured out how to get best results in what at the time would have been a poorly understood new regulatory world that rewarded of financialisation.
I don't like to think in absolutes, so I was a little hyperbolic when I said he was responsible for the failure. You're probably right that it would have gradually happened anyway, but my limited understanding is he became the celebrity face to it that legitimized it and made it the defacto strategy. He is more than a little responsible for the mess we're in.
Seems somewhat legitimate, though I'd prefer more log graphs, linear scales can be misleading. Perhaps the Hakone Maru in 1968, the first TEU container ship (I think), was a harbinger.
A lot of that page builds a lot of point about specific time in order to sell the idea about dropping the unviable gold standard (in the form of Bretton-Woods system) as the real culprit.
I know only a little about his history at GE. And I don’t have any reason to defend the guy, just curious what the view is these days.