Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon

by William D. Cohan

Why has nearly every board member, especially the most powerful ones, including Jack Brennan and Sandy Warner, steadfastly refused to engage in any effort to explain the board’s responsibility for what happened to GE? In 2001, Jeff was handed the most valuable, most respected company in the world to manage, and in 2017 he handed off to his successor a company badly damaged, “a company on fire,” as one executive told me. Jeff was “imperial” and “delusional,” many people explained. But the failure of the GE board to rein in Jeff’s behavior and to question Jeff’s judgment more deeply, or to push back against his imperial and delusional tendencies, together stand as one of the greatest corporate governance abdications in American history. The abject failing of the GE board is yet another example of the old Wall Street adage that “success has many fathers and failure is an orphan.”