alt Hacker NewsWay before that, as usual we can attribute quite a lot of stupidity in corporate governance to Jack Welch. Execs really bought into Welch's schtick wholly, they went to MBA schools praising Welch's management style, read his books, or at least got taught by people who had bought wholly into it.
So much time has passed that I believe truly the current crop of execs don't know any better, they think this status quo is the only way to manage companies. They aren't really wrong since the incentives are there, and they continue to reap rewards from doing it.
Agreed. For a long time Jack Welch was lauded as "The Greatest CEO in History" for burning GE to the ground in a way that made a lot of money (while destroying a company that took 100 years to build and employed 400,000 people).
By the time he died (pretty recently actually, 2020!), it was pretty obvious what kind of legacy he was leaving behind. Which is probably why his family was very careful to keep his burial location secret, presumably to keep people from peeing on his grave.