I’m not sure if this was originally planned as a long read for Bloomberg or Wired or something, but it seemed to me to be very padded. I really struggled to stay engaged.
We learn the backstory of figures that appear for a single chapter. There is a lot of inside-baseball HR stuff that is completely irrelevant – stories of affairs and multiple marriages, people leaving the regulator to go to private industry like it’s some cloak-and-dagger stuff, and there is a lot of implied sketchiness that isn’t fairly interrogated (one person moved jobs and the author suggests ‘it looked like a possible conflict of interest’). Not exactly damning stuff.
Truth is though the story has been told a million times before: good company focused on doing things well gets co-opted by overconfident finance guys who think that knowing Jack Welch makes them Jack Welch, put profit ahead of everything else. Mayhem ensues. Nothing really changes. Lather rinse repeat.
