The Sad Story of Jack Welch in Retirement: Opinion By Nat Worden
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Look out, readers. With Election Day approaching, silly season has begun.
In response to much-needed positive developments in the U.S. labor market -- the unemployment rate finally dropped below 8% -- many people got strangely angry, including the former CEO of one of the nation's most prominent companies, General Electric(GE).
"Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change the numbers," wrote Jack Welch on Twitter after the news broke. The comment was partly a reference to President Obama's poor performance in the recent presidential debate.
It's no secret the elderly have trouble navigating the Internet, but I suspect Welch's accusation that the President of the United States is manipulating employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics must have come straight from the gut, to borrow a phrase from Neutron Jack's bestselling, add-to-the-pile book.
It's an ironic accusation coming from Welch, who knows a thing or two about employment. After all, he achieved success at GE by slashing more than 100,000 jobs at the company in the 1980s to boost profits.
Then the irony gets even thicker when one considers that Welch is now widely remembered as Corporate America's most skillful manipulator of quarterly earnings results and manager of expectations on Wall Street -- a skill that is particularly handy for CEOs overly focused on their stock price.
He looks more like a quack now than a leader, and when you combine that with the terrible performance of his company after his departure, it becomes clear that dumb luck probably had as much to do with Welch's business success as anything that he wrote in his book.
In retrospect, Welch is probably one of the most overrated -- and overpaid -- CEOs in U.S. corporate history. Despite all the claims from industry that exorbitant compensation packages for CEOs are necessary to preserve talent, the truth is that in many cases, people who could do the job far better than these clowns are probably a dime a dozen.
That brings us back to Welch, whose unseemly divorce proceedings in 2001 revealed his "stealth" compensation. Unbeknownst to them, shareholders were paying Welch a retirement stipend of $734,000 per month. His other retirement benefits, valued at $2 million per year, included a New York apartment with daily flower deliveries and wine, along with unlimited use of the corporate jet
http://www.thestreet.com/story/11729676 ... inion.html