Compromised

by Peter Strzok

Book list In 2017, Jeff Immelt stepped down as CEO of General Electric after more than 15 years at the company's helm. Immelt had succeeded legendary CEO Jack Welch, who'd navigated GE since 1981. The company weathered tough times during Immelt’s ascension, starting with 9/11. Multiple facets of the conglomerate bore heavy losses due to the terrorist attacks, particularly its GE Capital division. In the aughts, accounting scandals at Enron, Tyco, and others spurred new legislation dealing with corporate accounting, and GE faced further scrutiny in how it booked revenue. The 2008 worldwide recession nearly crippled the company in respects to GE Capital's exposure to toxic assets. Immelt’s successor John Flannery began his tenure putting out various fires around the company, including the broke Power division. Thirty plus years of building up without looking back came home to roost. Gryta and Mann expand on their Wall Street Journal reporting to create a compelling narrative of a giant’s spectacular fall in this powerful and fascinating read.

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Publishers Weekly A venerable American company struggles for survival and eventually crashes, in this exciting offering from Wall Street Journal reporters Gryta and Mann. Formed in the late 19th century, General Electric enjoyed a long, genteel reign as America’s dominant producer of electrical goods. The book centers on the company’s dramatic decline, starting with longtime CEO Jack Welch’s exit in September 2001, and his replacement by his handpicked successor, Jeff Immelt. Inheriting a company typified by rigid procedures and a boys’ club culture, Gryta and Mann note, Immelt was determined to drag GE into the modern day. The authors track these attempts at reinvention, such as by adopting a “lean manufacturing” model antithetical to GE’s traditionally meticulous product-development approach. They also cover the hard-fought battles with the Environmental Protection Agency, ill-conceived business dealings, and falling stock prices that marred Immelt’s reign. After Immelt retired in 2017, GE veteran John Flannery took over, only to discover a chaotic, money-losing mess, with “reported profits were aspirational, if not fraudulent.” Possessing all the suspense of a true-crime account, Gryta and Mann’s riveting look at GE’s previous two decades underlines the harsh facts of survival in 21st-century business. Agent: Eric Lupfer, Fletcher & Co. (Apr.)

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Kirkus Two Wall Street Journal reporters expand years of their newspaper coverage into a detailed book about the decline of General Electric due in large part to management incompetence, greed, and dishonesty. Founded in Schenectady, New York, in 1892, General Electric eventually grew into one of the world’s largest corporations, selling products and services with sterling reputations, developing a loyal workforce, training managers who earned renown (especially Jack Welch), and providing reliable investments for stockholders. Examining what went wrong during the past two decades, Gryta and Mann focus mostly on CEO Jeff Immelt and his successor, John Flannery. During their stewardships, GE stock prices and number of employees dropped significantly. At times, financial disaster seemed imminent, as the corporation sold many of its electricity-related assets to raise cash. When Flannery arrived in 2017, the company was fighting “dysfunction tending toward chaos and a confrontation with the past that was mere weeks from spilling into public view. Beneath the placid surface, GE was in total disarray.” The authors attempt to place the demise in a larger context by noting that for many decades, GE served as a model of excellent management for countless other corporations. This leads the authors to wonder about the viability of many other seemingly healthy corporations. Often, the authors’ exploration of the bigger picture falls victim to the excruciatingly detailed saga of GE. Readers without a direct connection to the corporation—e.g., current or former employees, outside corporate analysts, and investors—will be tempted to skim the parts of the narrative about the dizzying maneuvering inside the corporate suites. The authors’ knowledgeable reporting is mostly top-down, as they rarely focus on lower-level employees. They analyze Immelt from a variety of angles, and while he certainly emerges as a complex figure, the authors struggle to make him compelling as a protagonist. The book would have been more engaging if shortened by nearly 100 pages. An overlong survey that may interest business students as a case study. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly In this carefully worded and intermittently intriguing account, former FBI agent Strzok offers an inside look at investigations into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, and links between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Readers hoping for details about Strzok’s extramarital relationship with his colleague Lisa Page, which came to light during an inquiry into allegations that text messages the two exchanged revealed “improper political bias,” will be disappointed. Strzok declines to delve into the “terrible personal decisions” that contributed to his dismissal from the FBI and fueled speculation that he was part of an anti-Trump conspiracy. Instead, he details his role in Operation Ghost Stories, the FBI case that inspired the TV show The Americans; blames Clinton for “unforced error” that dragged out the scandal over her emails; and suggests that national security adviser Michael Flynn “baldly lied” to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials because he was either “deep in denial” or “too naive to know how much trouble he was in.” Throughout, Strzok credibly defends the professionalism of America’s intelligence agencies and provides an intimate and impassioned perspective on how “Trump’s bullying broken the system.” Still, this circumspect account is unlikely to lay any of the accusations against Strzok and his former colleagues to rest. (Sept.)

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