GE had always liked to think of itself as a hotbed of research and development in the model of Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory. From the start, though, the company drew as much from the financial brilliance of its co-founder, John Pierpont Morgan, as from Edison’s engineering prowess. A failure to keep up with how equity and debt markets changed in the 21st century is at least as important an element in its downfall as industrial missteps.
Genius, the inventor Thomas Edison once said, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. He might have added: In business, it’s also almost 100% commercialization.
That’s a final lesson for General Electric Co, the industrial conglomerate Edison helped found that’s being split into three after nearly 130 years — as well as for Toshiba Corp, once effectively GE’s Japanese unit and now also considering a division into three separate businesses.
