Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon

Cohan (The Last Tycoons), a journalist and former investment banker, delivers an ambitious history of General Electric, suggesting that the company’s story offers “a cautionary tale about hubris, blind ambition, and the limits of believing—and trying to live up continuously to—a flawed corporate mythology.” The author tracks that mythology, which “embodied both the muscle of American business—entrepreneurial drive, inventiveness, financial legerdemain— and its weaknesses,” from the company’s early days in the late 1800s with Thomas Alva Edison and Charles Albert Coffin at the helm, through the reigns of Jack Welch, “the octogenarian titan of American capitalism” who took over GE in the middle of a price-fixing scandal in the 1960s, and Jeff Immelt, who was running GE’s medical equipment business when he was tapped to be CEO in 2001. Meticulously researched, Cohan’s history covers the EPA/Hudson river scandal in the 1970s (in which GE was caught dumping chemicals), the late-’90s immersion of “Six Sigma” statistics-based practices into corporate life, and intense succession battles. Cohan’s access to the major players bears significant fruit, and the resulting narrative is dramatic without being overblown, making for a gripping account of a corporate behemoth and the men who ran it. Business history buffs, take note. [em]Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary. (Nov.) [/em]