Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon

by William D. Cohan

At a meeting with GE’s top executives at Crotonville in August, John shared with GE’s top executives a twenty-page PowerPoint presentation about how much cash the company was actually generating compared with how much cash people thought the company was generating. It was an eye-opener. Normally, the presentations at Crotonville were like a “puppet show,” one GE executive told me, where “everybody [would] get up and say how great everything is.” But this time, the executive continued, John “was like, ‘Fuck that, people need to know what’s going on in this company.’ ” He walked the group through the problems in the power business, the factoring of the receivables, the ill-fated stock buybacks, what happened to the money that GE Capital generated with asset sales, how much debt GE had, that GE’s dividend had been in excess of its cash flow for three straight years.