by Anand Giridharadas
It is a rare and powerful thing these days for someone to admit they were wrong. In our culture of competitive certitude, it is a risk too many of us are unwilling to take.
That’s just one of the reasons I admire the New York Times business reporter David Gelles’s powerful new book, “The Man Who Broke Capitalism,” about Jack Welch and the larger crisis he fomented. It’s out today.
The main target of the book’s criticism is clear from the subtitle: “How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America — and How to Undo His Legacy.” But as you’ll see in my conversation with David below, this is also a project rooted in his own realizations about his own past failures as a business reporter and, frankly, the failures of much (but not all) of the business press at large.
“When I think back to some of my early stories and my early jobs, like at Forbes magazine, I was essentially playing a boosterish role with the business world and trying to celebrate the success of businesses on their own terms,” David told me the other day, capturing how much of the business media has tended to write about business in an era of growing elite capture and savage, widening inequities.
But then covering stories like the Boeing 737 Max crashes awakened David to what he had missed in all those years of reporting. He realized that he, like so many in his guild, had given CEOs too much faith. That set him on the road to telling the story of how one CEO above all, the CEOs’ CEO, Jack Welch, broke American capitalism.
You won’t want to miss the conversation about Welch, the larger crisis he shaped and reflected, and where business journalism should go from here.
Read the full story here: Like capitalism itself, business journalism is broken. Can it be fixed? (the.ink)
