the absence of robust opposition also pointed to the broader problem, long cultivated and growing into a quiet crisis within the company, of real candor and self-awareness. For all its vaunted levels of management and procedures of accountability, when it had come time for lower levels of management to stand up to the ultimate boss, Immelt, and tell him that his legacy play wasn’t going to work—and in fact, had been a clumsy mistake all along—no one was willing to do so.
