Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

Like Gekko in Wall Street and Blake in Glengarry, Welch was known for being brutally candid. In fact, GE made a doctrine out of brutality, codified it as a system that ensured worker insecurity by constantly identifying a quota of doomed losers. Every year, according to Welch’s new rule, one out of every ten GE employees were fired, no matter what, because nine other employees were judged by their superiors to be superior. It was called the Vitality Curve, and other big companies were soon instituting dread-inducing worker-culling systems with their own euphemistic names—Personal Business Commitments at IBM, Individual Dignity Entitlement at Motorola. At GE, many were never replaced; during Welch’s first five years as CEO, the workforce shrank by a quarter, and he became known as Neutron Jack—ha!—because like a neutron bomb, he evaporated tens of thousands of people without damaging the businesses where they worked. Such corporate “rank-and-yank” systems were just one way that an acute new sense of economic insecurity spiked in the 1980s and then stayed high.