In 1960, the Department of Justice indicted executives from several companies for involvement in a huge price-fixing scheme across much of the electrical industry. The story was like a bad spy novel—secret hotel-room meetings, conversations in code—and its chief villain was General Electric, which was then the world’s biggest company. Sixteen G.E. executives were convicted of violating antitrust laws, and the affair is still known as the Great Electrical Price Conspiracy. It was never proved that G.E.’s top brass knew what was going on, but, even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, it was a profound management failure. Yet Ralph Cordiner, G.E.’s chairman and C.E.O., not only escaped prosecution; he even got to keep his job.
John Stumpf should have been so lucky. The other week, Stumpf lost…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 7, 2016