GE's Greed.

• Author: Mintz, Morton
• Position: Review

This book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of corporate America. Superbly researched and written, it could drive some readers to take a fresh look at stocks. I mean the old-fashioned kind, the kind consisting of a heavy timber frame with holes for confining the ankles and sometimes the wrists. Of whom? First, the czar of the world's most profitable corporation, the most successful, most admired big-business executive in America, a frequent White House guest of Ronald Reagan, a golfing partner of Bill Clinton, the father of corporate downsizing. Next in line, his hatchet-men, followed by bought legislators and scientists. Finally, idolaters--journalists, authors, business-school professors. To believe them, John F. Welch's General Electric brings only good things to life. Thomas F. O'Boyle persuades you that GE--Jack Welch's GE--brings bad things to life. In abundance.

Yet At Any Cost is no populist tract. The author, a longtime Wall Street Journal correspondent and now an assistant managing editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, draws stark contrasts between the many large corporations that prosper mightily with foresighted, rational and humane policies, and GE as it's been run for 18 years by a tyrannical, sometimes impetuous, surprisingly blunder-prone, and--above all--profit-obsessed chairman and CEO.

"I have done everything in my power to write a fair and balanced account of General Electric," O'Boyle writes. He succeeds at every turn, partly by providing insightful, textured context--historical, scientific, engineering, competitive, political, legal, ethical, personal. He enables readers to see things whole. Yes, the Justice Department obtained price-fixing indictments against GE's synthetic diamond business and the DeBeers cartel (it makes a fascinating chapter even if Justice lost in the end). Remember, though, that between 1940 and 1948, when Welch was a boy, the government had sued GE for antitrust violations 13 times. O'Boyle shows how Welch's obsession with profit, an ideology, really, translates into unrelenting, pitiless pressure on his executives to better last year's numbers every year. They must do this with "enthusiasm and gusto," real or feigned, because loyalty in Welch's GE runs only upward. Their heads are never far from the chopping block. They sometimes do terrible things. Could it be otherwise?

GE had 285,000 U.S. workers when Welch took over in 1981; it had 120,000 fewer by 1997. If his profit...