GE’s breathtaking growth under Welch was fueled in large part by its transformation into a financial services superpower. By 2000, nearly half of the company’s revenue—$96 billion—came from GE Capital
GE’s exposure to finance proved to be an enormous vulnerability after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and particularly during the financial crisis of 2008. While Welch’s successor, Jeff Immelt, tried to diminish GE’s reliance on finance, his efforts came too late.
I've read "At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit" and I consider him a con man. Stack ranking was just a nice veener to justify layoffs whose primary motivation were to inflate the valuation of GE and increase its perceived profitability.
To be fair, Welch gave what the investors wanted, but he corrupted everything in pursuit of that. If the primary proof of stack ranking's "wisdom" was that GE's stock went up then that is a sad indictment of the state of business culture in the West.
Basically, Jack Welch was in the right place at the right time, probably (almost definitely) played semi-legal accounting games to beat analyst estimates (a practice which later led to accounting fraud charges [2]), and pretty much mortgaged the company's future in exchange for short-term boosts by selling off many of its business units and focusing on GE Capital, which basically got annihilated a few years after Jack left. So he was also a master of leaving other people holding the bag. Also, the man was apparently (according to many people who worked with him) a massive asshole with a huge ego problem and would epitomize every negative stereotype of white male executives if he were still alive today [3].
[1] https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/leaders/jack-welch-infl...
[2] https://www.cfo.com/accounting-tax/2009/08/ge-settles-accoun...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-jack-welch-wont-be-missed/