The Dismantling of America

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What happened to GE?

Bill Gates shares his review of “Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric” by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann
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"Chapter 14 of Lights Out details many of the gimmicks GE employed to make the numbers look better than they really were. For example, Gryta and Mann report that GE would sometimes artificially boost quarterly profits by selling an asset (e.g., a diesel train) to a friendly bank, knowing that it could then buy back the asset at a time of GE’s choosing. "

I worked for a company that did something of that nature. Many of our Navy contracts were funded by "progress payments" in which a portion of the final sales price for a complete system would be paid upon reaching an agreed milestone midway in the process, things like completing assembly or placing a completed assembly in the 7-day elevated temperature burn-in phase (after a complete system test, intended to weed out early component failures). There was usually a big push at the end of the month, end of the quarter, and end of the fiscal year to get systems into burn-in even though we in the production test group knew that the systems would fail the final test the next week.
 
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