Nothing is free!

                              

                       Everything has a price, and the key to a lot of things with money is just figurung out what that price is and being willing to pay.

            The problem is that the price of lot of things is not obvious untill you experience them.

          

  General Electric was the largest company in the world in 2004, worth a third off trillion dollars. it had been mostly rated first or second as one of the top 10 companies, captalism shining example of corporate aristocracy.

            Then everything changes in 2008, fell to pieces, 2008 financial crises sent GE's financing division which supplied more than half the company's profits into chaos. It was sold for scrap eventually. subsequent bets on oil and energy were catastophic, resluting billions in writeoffs. GE stock fell from $40 in 2007 to $7 in 2018.

            CEO Jeff Immlet who ran the company since 2001, was immediate and harsh. He was critisized for his leaderhip, acquisitions, cutting the dividends, laying off workers and also plunging the stock price. He made the company a mess. He stepped down in 2017. But Immlet said something insight during his departure from the company, his actions were wrong and what he should have done was obvious, he told his successor, "Every job looks easy when you are not doing it."

            It looks easy for you watching from the crowd when you are not doing it, dealing with demands of sprawking bloat, shot-term investors, unoins, regulators and beurocracy is not only hard to do, but it's even hard to recorgnise the severity of the problems until you are the one dealing with them. Immlet's successor lasted only 14 months and learned this as well.

            Most things are harder in practise then they are in theory. Sometimes this is because we are overconfident. More often it is due to not good at identiying what the price of success is and not been able to pay it.