Jack Welch, what remains of the tough manager who changed corporate America

Then there is the question of human capital. The system that Welch introduced - known as the rank and yank, or more elegantly as the vitality curve - involved the annual classification of all managers into three categories: the best 20% to be rewarded, 70% to be developed, and 10% to be eliminated. It was brutal, and Welch made no secret of it. But it was also, in its way, consistent: in a system where expectations were explicit, there was no room for duplicity. His organisations knew how to evaluate and how to be evaluated.

The problem was not so much the hardness itself, but the long-term systemic effects. That model normalised a conception of managerial work as a purely performance contract, emptied of any value or identity dimension. The mutual loyalty between company and manager - which had governed the post-war American economy - was replaced by a transactional logic in which continuity was a prize to be earned every year. When that model left GE and spread to the rest of the corporate world - starting with strategic consulting and some Silicon Valley tech companies - it brought with it all its contradictions: the acceleration of managerial turnover, the difficulty of building long-term projects, the friability of organisational cultures.

The fourth crucial point that Welch anticipated was the control of the narrative. GE's entry into the media world - up to and including its control of CNBC through its stake in NBC - was not a marginal detail. An industrial group that presides over business publishing not only controls its own results, but also the frame through which the industry's numbers are read. It is not surprising that for years that same media machine treated Welch as an oracle, likening him to the same Warren Buffett.

As is often the case with unwieldy figures, Welch left many clones behind him. GE had been one of America's great talent factories for decades, and many of its former executives went on to lead large companies. But the problem was more subtle. Welch did not build a continuity capable of evolving the model. He trained excellent executors of already given visions, not performers capable of updating them when the context changed. Jeff Immelt found himself running an extraordinary but also deeply exposed machine in a world where the coordinates had already changed. It is not Welch's fault that Immelt was not up to the task. But it is at least partly his responsibility if the system he built did not include any toolbox to adapt.

Words like sustainability, inclusiveness, social responsibility - which today fill corporate documents and board agendas - were essentially absent from its cultural horizon. Not because they were denied, but because they did not belong to the semantic field of that capitalism.

Perhaps the most useful question today is whether the model it embodied has really waned, or whether it survives, like embers under the ashes. Today, at first glance, companies write and speak of purpose, of stakeholder capitalism, of the long term. But the actual mechanisms of performance evaluation, capital allocation, and measurement of managerial success still closely resemble those Welch defined in the 1980s.

In the past few days, in the Financial Times, Brené Brown, an American researcher who has become famous for bringing the topic of empathetic leadership and vulnerability to the management world, issued a warning: many leaders are ceasing to soften their hardest traits. It is not so much a return of ruthless leadership as 'the end of its pretence'. After years in which the lexicon of empathy was often adopted more as linguistic code than actual practice, the pendulum seems to be swinging back towards more explicit and less mediated forms of leadership.

The long shadow of Welch's style - direct, demanding, sometimes brutal - seems to resurface as a deep structure never really overcome. After all, Welch interests us not only because of what he was. We are interested because we still live in the world he helped build.

To understand him is to understand something of the contradictions that we are trying, with effort and still uncertain results, to overcome.

*International Advisory Board GSOM Politecnico di Milano