In January 2019 I posted a piece about General Electric. As you can see if you click on the link, the point of the piece was the irony: the company that louder and longer than any other in the world had touted the virtues of leadership training and development, had been hoisted by its own petard. GE’s own leadership cadre was so feeble and feckless it led the company straight downhill.
Now the final act: three days ago GE announced it will split into three different companies. This means that GE as we have known it, as it has been known worldwide for decades, is history.
The Wall Street Journal covered the story extensively. It ran several pieces about GE’s descent, including one titled, “The Fall of the Colossus.” The article referenced the irony to which I refer – that GE had been led by leaders who were woefully deficient, notwithstanding its enormous investment in learning to lead.
But while financial journalist Jason Zweig acknowledged that “GE’s corporate culture prided itself on elevating management to a kind of science,” he never looked under the hood. He left unanswered the question of how it happened that a corporate culture so deeply dedicated to leadership development failed to develop good leaders. Leaders who, at least, were good enough to keep the ship afloat. In fact, Zweig’s phrase, the one that intimates that management might be a “kind of science,” is curious. Does he think that GE was simply misguided when it elevated management to a kind of science? Meaning that management is a kind of science – but one that GE managers never learned to master? Or is Zweig suggesting that the very idea of management as anything approximating a science is mistaken?
Questions like these matter because they have been asked for eons – but never been answered. And they matter because the leadership industry continues handsomely to profit from the proposition that it knows what it’s doing, and why it’s doing it.