Mariner Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric

Good general business reading, combining a good story with business insights.

I spent 25 years with GE (17 as an executive band employee), and worked at 6 different businesses within the company. I joined one of the company's corporate leadership programs directly from a 4 year tour with the Army - I targeted GE specifically as I was leaving the military and spent 6 months pestering the company for an interview before they agreed to speak with me. When I finally got an offer I just couldn't believe how blessed I was. I am proud of my GE career, and I am grateful for the chances I had to work with high quality people during my time there. It wasn't an easy place to make a career, and the company had a lot of warts, but I found the culture to be mostly inspiring (more under Welch than Immelt) and the opportunities for growth were incredible.Reliving the unraveling of a company I loved was not easy, but I would still recommend this book to anyone wondering what happened. For me, it was a difficult, almost cathartic read. My former GE colleagues, especially the ones who spent many years with GE, will recognize many of the people, events and cultural dynamics the author describes. This book is well researched and well written.

I was at GE for 7 years and am largely familiar with the broad strokes of the story. There were several smaller things in the book that I never knew or had heard of, so I don't regret spending all day reading the Kindle book. The story skipped around jarringly throughout the book, but as former GE I could keep up.It was interesting to hear an account of John Flannery's departure from his side. Jeff Immelt was portrayed as a somewhat clueless but likable jerk in a few spots, and arguably delusional.Insulting Larry Culp's suit size choices seemed unnecessary and petty.My main problem is the book doesn't live up to what I had expected - deep insights into what went wrong and why. The book was mostly shallow coverage of public material, with some small fresh insights from their interviews peppered in.

I purchased the book mainly because I work for the digital operations of one of GE's rivals and many of our leadership are GE alumni.I think the book really fails to show what went wrong at GE (ironically the title is the fall of GE). Authors spent 2/3 of the book talking about GE Capital...that business unit was practically shrunked by mid 2010s and there were much deeper problems at GE than Capital. Authors never discuss Renewables that practically never turned a profit, Transportation that didn't have any sales for years. Briefly talk about Digital which was a huge disaster, mention Power a few times although it was arguably a unit that broke their back. The entire book is about dissing Jeff Immelt, which in no doubt was an incompetent CEO who contributed big time to GE's misery. But for a company with 8 9 business units where all but one or two were in an absolute state of disarray, the problems are far more deeply rooted than a bad CEO in corporate office who is not involved with business units' day to day decisions.The book had a lot of potential to get deep in why things went wrong but so far it's all 'it was Jeff Immelt's fault'.

Having spent 5 years on a GE leadership team, much of what I read in this well-written book rings true. I don’t know if accounting fraud was committed, but from what I’ve witnessed in meetings I wouldn’t be surprised.GE’s sick culture of humiliating people (in front of their peers) for not meeting numbers or making specific sales, regardless of reason, is enough to make anyone consider dishonesty to avoid torture. According to one of bosses (who thought he was one of the contenders to replace Immelt) this culture was largely created by Jack ‘Birther’ Welch. Welch may have made lots of money for the company during his best decade, but he led the company away from core strengths by distracting it with the now discredited financing business and other ridiculous diversions. Welch turned leadership into a cult that Immelt happily continued. I remember being cautioned by two long time senior GE execs never to question Jeff’s opinions. GE’s fall from grace, due to abysmal leadership, was tragically inevitable.

As an 8 year executive of a business bought by GE, I found this incredibly accurate.