DID GENERAL ELECTRIC TRY TO DERAIL CRITICAL BOOK?

A new book critical of General Electric and its CEO Jack Welch came under close scrutiny from lawyers for General Electric.

"This was a very contentious project from the start," said Thomas O'Boyle, author of At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric and the Pursuit of Profit (Knopf, 1998). "GE has made many complaints during the course of the writing of this book."

O'Boyle, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a current assistant managing editor at the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, said that GE's lawyers "raised concerns that they had about the project."

"There was an implied threat of legal action," O'Boyle said.But he refused to make public letters he received from GE's lawyers.

When asked whether GE's lawyers contacted O'Boyle during the writing of the book and raised concerns about it, GE spokesman Bruce Bunch said "that's not anything I would comment on, one way or the other."

In the book, O'Boyle portrays Welch, also known as "Neutron Jack," as an overly aggressive manager who puts profits above human and community concerns.

Over 17 years as CEO, Welch eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs, bought and sold hundreds of businesses, and shifted the company's focus from manufacturing to entertainment, O'Boyle reports.

During the same period, the company was caught in a web of scandals including defective refrigerators brought to market, industrial wastes improperly buried, excessive radiation in the workplace, fraud in military contract procurement, and the Kidder,Peabody disaster -- all reported in detail in the book.

O'Boyle writes that to many of the people who worked at General Electric, "the connection between the severity of Welch's demands and the occurrence of repeated scandal was a clear cause and effect, as transparent as glass."

O'Boyle also details the frat house atmosphere at GE Plastics, the division where Welch started his career.

O'Boyle reports that:

-- "Extravagance was a way of life at GE Plastics. Like Welch's Phi Sigma Kappa college fraternity, which threw the wildest parties at the University of Massachusetts, Jack's boys at Plastics were a wild fraternity."

-- "Trashing hotels was considered being one of the boys, so was playing demolition derby with rental cars. At the annual meeting one year in Montreal, the German sales contingent heaved a grand piano out the hotel window (fortunately, it was on the ground floor.)"

-- "The damage done at some hotels was so great that GE Plastics was asked not to return."

When asked about the aggressive partying at GE Plastics, Bunch said "no comment."

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