YouSaid · the spoken record

William Cohan

lines on the record: 60
first: 2023-02-24
most recent: 2023-02-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, I mean, obviously when a company has got sort of like a command and control approach, there can often be more accountability. It's clear where the lines are and where the lines that you can't break or you can't ignore or violate. But also that can sort of stifle innovation, stifle creativity, you know, stifle management development. And I think what happened in the case of GE was getting to become a bigger and bigger company, more bureaucratic sort of stagnating in terms of growth. And so I think the idea that Ralph Cordner had was to try to push down responsibility into the organization and to pull back a little bit on the command and control nature of GE's business with this very powerful central office.”
2023-02-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP527: The Epic Collapse of GE w/ William Cohan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of time and didn't happen overnight. And I think Charles Covin really saw the way to do this. And by merging his company with Emison General Electric and becoming GE and basically having kind of a monopoly on this business in the population centers of America at that time, New York City and the Northeast Thompson Houston Company was a lot more profitable than Innocent General Electric. And I think JP Morgan, the man and Charles Coffinsbackers saw that too. And that's how this merger occurred. And after the near fiasco of 1893, he resolved, of course, to have a fortress balance sheet to never have much debt at all if he could avoid it. And then he just became a great leader of men. He selected a smart successor. He really was, I have to agree with Jim Collins on this definitely. The right man at the right time who's...”
2023-02-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP527: The Epic Collapse of GE w/ William Cohan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, if you can imagine, Trey, if you're used to lighting your home with a wood fire or candles or with whale oil, along comes electricity and the electric grid and electric power, which seems utterly mysterious, right? I mean, it's a total black box. Whatever you did, you know, you flipped a switch or whatever you did and next thing you know, you had a light bulb that lighted up. I mean, that had to be a mystery, like in the same way that you turn the key in a car and the engine goes on and next thing you can drive yourself away. I mean, this obviously was a huge innovation, a huge leap forward, but also scary for people. And often people would reluctantly hook up to Edison's or Coffins to use electric grid and then firewood result and their business would burn down. So adoption of this took”
2023-02-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP527: The Epic Collapse of GE w/ William Cohan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. He's definitely one of the more interesting characters completely overlooked, which is a shame. He deserves serious treatment, which of course I tried to give him, but I wasn't writing a biography of him. He grew up in Maine and his family, he went to work for his uncle's shoe manufacturing company outside of Boston. And again, I just see, you know, so many parallels to today. You know, shing manufacturing was competitive, not particularly sexy or profitable, but there was this other business called the generation of electricity, which was new and exciting and innovative. And, you know, had the potentials like, say, the internet, 100 years later to really fast forward to be a quantum leap forward in the way people live their lives.”
2023-02-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP527: The Epic Collapse of GE w/ William Cohan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, no doubt that was useful if you go to the research lab in Miskayuna, New York, as soon as you walk into this huge lobby, it's all Thomas Edison all the time. Well, what I discovered was that that actually wasn't really true. It was part of the mythology. Thomas Edison, yes, had created a company called Edison General Electric to sort of capitalize on his creation of”
2023-02-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP527: The Epic Collapse of GE w/ William Cohan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, especially as I was researching the early history of the company, which of course I didn't know much about, there were a number of interesting revelations, one of which was Gigi liked to promote the idea that Thomas Edison Was the founder of the company, you know, which is great. I mean, who wouldn't want to have Thomas Edison be a key part of a company DNA? It implies immediately great technological innovation and creativity. And, you know, I think. I'm going to say, listen, it's obviously one of the great entrepreneurs inventors in our country's history.”
2023-02-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP527: The Epic Collapse of GE w/ William Cohan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“GE and a lot of it promulgated by the company itself, it was just helpful for me to sort of be able to cut through that and know, have a sense of what I was really writing about and reporting about.”
2023-02-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP527: The Epic Collapse of GE w/ William Cohan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were ups and downs like any job, but I found it sort of paternalistic in a nice way. There were all these crazy trips that they would take you on, even if you weren't like the top performer. You still got to go on a trip to some golf resorts for a few days. They got me a car to commute from New York to Stanford. And it was like a BMW they got me. I'm thinking, okay, you know, I'm sort of working tangentially to Wall Street. I'm working on interesting things. You know, Wall Street had blown up in October of 1987 and GE Capital sort of got stronger and stronger, even though the rest of Wall Street was suffering. So it was all looking pretty good for me. And I think I got a good sense of the culture and that helped me tremendously when I was thinking of what to write in this book and what to say. Because again, as you said, there's so many myths that are created about Jack.”
2023-02-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP527: The Epic Collapse of GE w/ William Cohan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a year-long program out of the blue one day, I got asked to go on a GE trip to visit GE's lighting facility in Cleveland, you know, where they made the light bulbs. And on the same day, go to Louisville, Kentucky to their major appliance facilities. I have no idea how this came about. I have no idea why I was selected. I have no idea what was going on, but I did spend a day on a GE private jet going from New York to Cleveland and then to Louisville and then back with about a couple of GE executives and some Columbia J school classmates. So that was obviously quite revelatory to me and I'd never seen anything like that before. Never been on a private jet obviously before. So that sort of, you know, left a sort of curious and positive taste in my mouth. And then worked there.”
2023-02-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP527: The Epic Collapse of GE w/ William Cohan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, first of all, having worked there and made friends there and kept in touch with a number of people who I had worked with, as you do, you know, you don't keep in touch with everybody, but there are a few. And one of my office mate, when I first started at G Capital, incredibly was a guy named John Flannery who became the CEO of GE after Jeff Immelt. So here I'm embarking on this book. I have one of my friends is by then the former CEO. I happen to have a house on Nantucket, which of course is where a lot of G people live, including Jack Welch and others. And so I found that this network was opening to me in a good way for me to write this book, to get insights into it. When I was at Columbia Journalism School, which was a few years before I went to Columbia Village School, that we”
2023-02-24 · We Study Billionaires · TIP527: The Epic Collapse of GE w/ William Cohan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT