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

General Electric, founded in 1892, became one of America's most iconic corporations. For generations, it represented job security and a premier business education for managers. GE powered American infrastructure through lightbulbs, turbines, and other products, and under legendary CEO Jack Welch, entered the twenty-first century as America's most valuable corporation. Within two decades, however, the company had fundamentally changed. Lights Out examines GE's decline through the lens of CEO succession. When Welch's handpicked successor Jeff Immelt took over, he attempted to address flaws in the existing profit model but made costly mistakes of his own. The company's traditional win-at-all-costs culture gradually lost direction, contributing to organizational and personal decline. Written by two Wall Street Journal reporters who covered GE's fall, this account details the pivotal moments and decisions behind the company's transformation from American icon to cautionary tale. It explores leadership failures, the erosion of corporate culture, accounting practices that masked underlying problems, and the swift decline of a company once considered a bastion of stability and investment security.