Jack Welch

Jack Welch was born on November 19, 1935, in Peabody, Massachusetts, the only child of Grace (née Andrews), a homemaker, and John Francis Welch Sr., a Boston & Maine Railroad conductor. Welch was an Irish American and a Catholic. His paternal and maternal grandparents were both Irish.

Throughout his early life in middle school and high school, Welch found work in the summers as a golf caddie, newspaper delivery boy, shoe salesman, and drill press operator. Welch attended Salem High School, where he participated in baseball, football, and captained the hockey team.

Late in his senior year, Welch was accepted to University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he studied chemical engineering. Welch worked in chemical engineering at Sunoco and PPG Industries during his college summers. In his sophomore year, Welch became a member of the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. He graduated in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering, turning down offers from several companies in order to attend graduate school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Welch graduated from the University of Illinois in 1960, with a master's and a PhD in chemical engineering.

Welch later received an honorary Doctor of Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1982, and in 2009 an honorary doctorate from University of California, Los Angeles.

Following Welch's retirement from General Electric, he became an adviser to private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and to the chief executive of IAC, Barry Diller. In addition to his consulting and advisory roles, Welch had been active on the public speaking circuit and co-wrote a popular column for BusinessWeek with his wife, Suzy, for four years until November 2009. The column was syndicated by The New York Times.

In September 2004, the Central Intelligence Agency published a parody of Welch applying his management skills while serving as imagined Deputy Director of Intelligence.

In 2005, he published Winning, a book about management co-written with Suzy Welch, which reached No. 1 on The Wall Street Journal bestseller list, and appeared on New York Times Best Seller list.

On January 25, 2006, Welch gave his name to Sacred Heart University's College of Business, which was known as the "John F. Welch College of Business" until 2016, when it began using the name the "Jack Welch College of Business". Since September 2006, Welch had been teaching a class at the MIT Sloan School of Management to a hand-picked group of 30 MBA students with a demonstrated career interest in leadership.

In December 2016, Welch joined a business forum assembled by then president-elect Donald Trump to provide strategic and policy advice on economic issues.

Welch had four children with his first wife, Carolyn. They divorced amicably in 1987 after 28 years of marriage. His second wife, Jane Beasley, was a former mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer. She married Welch in April 1989, and they divorced in 2003. While Welch had crafted a prenuptial agreement, Beasley insisted on a ten-year time limit to its applicability, and thus she was able to leave the marriage reportedly with around $180 million.

Welch's third wife, Suzy Wetlaufer (née Spring), co-authored his 2005 book Winning as Suzy Welch. She served briefly as the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review. Welch's wife at the time, Jane Beasley, found out about an affair between Wetlaufer and Welch. Beasley informed the Review and Wetlaufer was forced to resign in early 2002 after admitting to the affair with Welch while preparing an interview with him for the magazine. They married on April 24, 2004.

Starting in January 2012, Welch and Suzy Welch wrote a biweekly column for Reuters and Fortune, which they both left on October 9, 2012, after an article critical of Welch and his GE career was published by Fortune.

Welch identified politically as a Republican. He stated that global warming is "the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring", and that it is a form of "mass neurosis". However, Welch additionally said that every business must embrace green products and green ways of doing business, "whether you believe in global warming or not... because the world wants these products".

Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the 2008 financial crisis, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."

Welch was widely criticized for his views on the employment data in the Bureau of Labor Statistics's September 2012 jobs report. After the release of the report stating that the U.S. unemployment rate had dropped from 8.1% to 7.8%, Welch tweeted, "Unbelievable jobs numbers... these Chicago guys will do anything... can't debate so change numbers". Welch stood by his tweet, stating if he could write it again, he would add question marks at the end to make it clear that his intention was to raise a question over the legitimacy of the numbers. A subsequent New York Post article on the employment data suggested manipulation of some of the survey responses by an individual employee in 2010, but that article was widely debunked, including the fact that the employee had not worked at the Bureau since 2011. No proof of the political manipulation of the job numbers from September 2012 has been presented. The Census Bureau later released a statement denying the possibility of systematic manipulation of the data. Still, in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Welch wrote that the debate led to people looking at unemployment data more carefully and skeptically. Referencing his original tweet, he stated "Thank God I did", in a Squawk Box appearance, and also wrote, "The coming election is too important to be decided on a number. Especially when that number seems so wrong".

Criticism

Twenty years later, the company's market capitalization was only $200 billion, a decrease of ~55%, and Welch refused to discuss its decline, other than noting much of the decline had resulted from investments in real estate, and that his immediate, handpicked successor Jeff Immelt had to deal with the after effects of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. The New York Times published a critical article in 2017, noting GE's stock price as overvalued under Welch because of the growth of the financial services sector, as well as describing the amalgamated corporation's decline in 16 years under Immelt, who likewise was one of the country's highest-paid managers and eventually sold off two of Welch's largest acquisitions, NBCUniversal and GE Capital.

Under Welch's leadership, GE waged a twenty-year battle with the Environmental Protection Agency and New York State over polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that the company dumped into the Hudson River at its capacitor products division plant in Hudson Falls, New York, an accusation that Jack Welch stated multiple times as vastly overstated.

Welch disputed scientists who classified PCBs as forever chemicals that can cause negative health consequences. The chemicals contaminated the aquifer beneath the plant to the point that the water was unusable for human consumption without treatment. New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation also advised people against eating fish from the river near the site. He went on to call the Obama administration's prioritization of addressing climate change "radical behavior".

The following year, CEO Welch took issue with reclassification of GE in the Fortune 500 as a "diversified financial services company" rather than an "electrical equipment company", and by 2005 many had noted that the price-earnings ratios of the financial services sector were lower than that for GE. In 2014, GE Capital (the company's major financial services branch organized during Welch's tenure) agreed to the largest credit card discrimination settlement in history, concerning many years of deceptive marketing as well as discriminatory credit practices. After Welch's tenure, GE Capital had been labeled as "too big to fail" and had become regulated by the Federal Reserve. The retired Welch publicly praised his former firm's "slim-down" and return to being an industrial company. In 2018 Welch discussed the different financial culture in Kidder, Peabody & Co., whose acquisition he arranged during his tenure at GE, and whose ethos was based on short-term bonus calculations. Shortly before the settlement was announced, GE Capital renamed itself as Synchrony Bank; the spin-off took two years.

Welch's income and assets came under particular scrutiny during his divorce from his second wife, Jane Welch, in 2001, for adultery with the woman who became his third wife. Court filings during the divorce described Welch's GE compensation, which led to a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of the then-retired Welch's employment contracts with GE.

In 1996, Welch and GE had agreed to a "retention package" worth $2.5 million, and which promised continued access after Welch's retirement to benefits he had received as CEO—including an apartment in New York, baseball tickets and the use of a private jet and chauffeured car. Welch stated that he did not want more money, nor a more traditional stock package, but instead preferred to retain the lifestyle he had enjoyed as GE's CEO. According to a 2008 interview with Welch, he had filed the agreement with the SEC, and addressed the media attention and accusations of being "greedy" by renouncing those benefits.

In 2012, Welch and his third wife, Suzy Welch, quit their business associations with Fortune magazine and Reuters news service after Fortune published an article which criticized Welch's tweet, shortly before the 2012 election, which alleged that the Obama administration manipulated certain economic statistics, as well as another article which elucidated the 100,000 jobs GE lost during his tenure as CEO.