Best Business Book of the Year

This book, about one of the most evil, long-lasting corporate CEOs the US has produced, is one I never thought would see the light of day. David Gelles has created a masterpiece, and it’s easily the year's best business book.

As a graduate professor of Management for over forty years, I loathed Welch and the self-serving principles that paradoxically earned him “Manager of the Century” by formerly influential business periodicals (most of which are now shuttered).

My students would look at me like I was nuts (“Jack Welch? How can you criticize the genius?”).

Colleagues at the Big Five consulting firms thought I had a personal axe to grind when I would methodically count the ways he was destroying GE, even before he retired. ?

I had been accumulating material for a decade, thinking I’d attempt a pin-prick to Welch’s balloon with an article after my last book was published (which included some unflattering material on Jack).

But once I saw what Gelles had produced, I knew Welch’s kimono was finally spread wide open. ?This book is superbly written, backed with precise data and references, and makes an ironclad case of how Welch became the most notorious CEO responsible for breaking modern capitalism. He was a liar, a cheat, with hollow-out principles and – stunningly - never creating and adhering to any real corporate strategy. Unbelievable, Huh?

It's the only business book I could not put down. Read it, and you’ll see how believable the Welch smoke and mirror phenomenon was, and the collateral damage it produced.

He never grew GE organically, but through shifty and poorly chosen acquisitions, the art of financialization (which Gelles affirms was probably illegal), and utter disrespect for employees – whether they were on the shop floor or in the other corner office diagonal to him.

If not for the fear he fueled, I would have expected a colleague or his board to have thrown him under a bus. But nobody had the guts.

That is the lesson we should take away from his book. Genuinely bad people like Welch must be taken down, regardless of your fear of them. They are bad for business and society.

Thanks, David Gelles . You've gifted us an important book about capitalism and a case of how it's gone astray.