Real lessons from GE remain lost on most

Whenever someone has an urge to list Connecticut’s failures — and that includes more people than any of us should be comfortable with — high on that list is the departure four years ago of one of the best-known corporations on the planet. What kind of disaster of a state could possibly let General Electric slip from our grasp, the naysayers constantly say?

This one is due for a reevaluation. GE’s time in Boston has been less than a rousing success, and it’s hard to quantify what the state is supposed to have lost. A few hundred jobs left when the company abandoned its Fairfield headquarters, but many more moved down the road to Norwalk. The company never paid much of anything in taxes when it was based here.

But it fits the narrative so perfectly — job-killing Connecticut sends corporations fleeing — that critics, in this case mostly state Republicans, can’t seem to let it go.

Another opportunity to flog the issue arose last week with the death of longtime GE head Jack Welch. Bob Stefanowski, a former GE executive as well as a once-and-surely-future gubernatorial candidate, lavished praise on his former boss, including his penchant to fire (sorry, “counsel out”) the lowestperforming workers every year (most reports put the number at 10 percent of the company; Stefanowski says 5 percent). Stefanowski, who said Connecticut could learn a few things from Welch’s example, says any company that doesn’t follow his lead will “ultimately fail,” which ignores the many companies that both don’t fire people en masse every year and also don’t fail.

But whatever one wants to say about Welch as a CEO (and people have said plenty), maybe we could dispense with the notion of lessons from the boardroom guiding state government.

The government can’t choose what services it wants to provide. It can’t sell off unproductive sectors. It can’t prize efficiency over efficacy, and it can’t act like the company’s stock price matters more than anything else. We ought to be past the point of modeling our governing strategies off what comes out of the corner office.

To his credit, Stefanowski keeps his recommendations for the state pretty low-key, including a plea for the state to save money by not overspending on vehicles and other small-bore matters. This is a bit rich coming in the context of GE, where the CEO who followed Welch used to travel around in a private jet with a backup private jet along for the ride just in case something happened to the first private jet. Regardless, sure, the state could afford to be more frugal.

Politically speaking, a bigger problem for Republicans is that the other party has adopted all its business-friendly talking points. Every Democratic policy proposal is framed in terms of creating or saving jobs, with even environmental groups selling bills based on their promised economic impact. It may not work in practice, but it has the effect of blunting Republican messaging. If both sides are talking the same language, neither side gains an advantage campaign-wise.

That leaves Republicans looking elsewhere, but culture war issues, which have served them so well around the country, do next to nothing for them in Connecticut. Railing about abortion or gay rights might play in Alabama, but not here. That leaves Republicans seeking out new culture-war territory, as evidenced by their attempt to turn transgender rights into a political wedge. That won’t work, either.

So the messaging reverts to CEO talk. And there really is a lesson to be derived from GE leaving Connecticut, but it has nothing to do with taxes. Company leaders were very clear that they thought they needed to be based someplace more interesting if they wanted to attract young talent. GE workers, extant and prospective, had no interest in what one top executive said was an office park they likened to “a morgue.”

“I can walk out my door and visit four startups,” then-Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Bornstein said of the company’s new Boston home in 2017. “In Fairfield, I couldn’t even walk out my door and get a sandwich.”

There’s a potent lesson in economic development there if anyone in Connecticut is interested.