San Antonio College Library

In the early 1990s Forbes magazine called General Electric "the most powerful enterprise in American business". Yet only a decade earlier this world-famous corporation, provider of light bulbs and aircraft engines, locomotives and medical imaging equipment, was heading for a crisis that few acknowledged. CEO Jack Welch - tough-minded, iconoclastic, controversial, courageous, despised - alone understood that, for GE to weather the stormy ocean of economic...

"California began the decade of the 1990s with a vertically integrated electric power system that had been working reasonably well under regulation. Still, there were opportunities for improvement. Although some reasons offered for restructuring were unrealistic, sufficiently valid reasons existed to proceed. There was, however, risk from the very beginning that things could go wrong - and go wrong they did." "The restructuring, often mischaracterized...