THICK END OF THE WEDGE: Make our CEOs part of the solution, not the problem
IN 1981, soon after Jack Welch became CEO of General Electric, he made a speech that is still credited with anchoring the idea in American minds that the creation of shareholder wealth was the core job of a modern CEO.Until corporate raiders began to scare CEOs by taking over their firms and breaking them up to create "shareholder value", American capitalism had been a relatively widely shared effort."The job of management," said Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon) in 1951, "is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various interested groups … stockholders, employees, customers and the public at large".Henry Ford once said, "There is one rule for the industrialist and that is (to) make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible."Welch might have had these echoes of a more collaborative US capitalism in mind when he declared, 28 years later, in an interview with the Finan...
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