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Welch also scoffs at the notion that his emphasis on winning might encourage employees to cheat or cut corners to meet corporate goals. "Joe Jett was thinking about GE's quarterly earnings sitting down there?" he asks rhetorically. "Anybody with an IQ over 70 would know that Joe Jett didn't , care about GE's earnings. He never thought about GE. He had a game going for himself." Besides, says Welch, he has no choice but to call upon his employees to push their limits. "How can you tell an organization, 'Run slower'?" he asks. "Or say, 'Let's not do well?' "
When it comes to Kidder, many Wall Street watchers insist that GE's 1987 purchase of that company was fated not to do well from the beginning. Acquired as a unit of GE Capital, a major provider of financial services, Kidder represented a plunge into brokerage and investment banking fields that GE knew little about. Scandal struck soon after the deal was completed when former Kidder merger whiz Martin Siegel pleaded guilty to illegal stock trading and tax evasion in a case that broke open Wall Street's most notorious insider- trading ring. This year Kidder has witnessed not only another huge scam but a swift run-up in interest rates that has battered the firm's portfolio of mortgage-backed securities; the drubbing could mean more than $500 million in losses for the ailing brokerage house, according to an outside estimate.
Welch, who tried to sell Kidder to financial conglomerate Primerica in 1992 only to have the deal fall through, must first nurse the firm back to health before he can have any hope of finding a buyer. In the latest management shuffle at the brokerage, Welch brought in a new executive team headed by Dennis Dammerman, GE's chief financial officer, to restore Kidder's profits. "What I've got to do with Kidder is get it solidly grounded," Welch says. "Until Kidder gets stabilized, I don't have very many options to do anything."
Like Kidder, NBC has from the start been a bruising journey into uncharted territory for GE. Close observers trace the declines in ratings and morale at the network to Welch's decision to install Robert Wright, who had been president of GE Financial, to run NBC. Wright promptly slashed budgets, laid off workers and, critics say, treated the business of providing news and entertainment as if it were indistinguishable from making loans or refrigerators.
"If Welch has a weakness, it may be that he is not a good judge of people," says Warren Bennis, a management professor at the University of Southern California business school. "Robert Wright was the wrong guy to put in charge of NBC. He didn't know anything about television, or the creative side. NBC has suffered under GE's management.'
So much so that some NBC managers are rooting for GE to sell the network swiftly. "The record speaks for itself," a high-level insider says. "NBC may be well placed: it's profitable and having the second best year in its history. But its performance on the screen doesn't measure up. The problem is with the people Welch put in and left in place. It was Robert Wright who picked Leno over Letterman, and you see how that turned out. The loss of Letterman was the dumbest thing to happen in TV history."