
It's always been a mystery to me why Jeff Zucker still has his job. After all, NBC is doing badly, and so is MSNBC and, uh, in case you haven't noticed, CNBC is embroiled in a huge institutional scandal. Maybe Telemundo is doing OK--that channel is a little outside of my purview.
But apparently TCG is not the only one who has noticed what a lousy job Zucker is doing: Here's Jack Welch, interviewed in New York magazine by Arianne Cohen.
Cohen asks Welch, "If NBC isn’t doing so well, why is Jeff Zucker still in his job?" And Welch answers, "’Cause I’m retired." Pow!
One wonders why Welch's successor as General Electric CEO, Jeff Immelt, hasn't gotten the message yet about Zucker; or maybe this interview was Welch's way of sending just such a message. But of course, to get to the incompetence of Zucker, Immelt would have to first get through the incompetence of Bob Wright, and that incompetence has been enormous for a long time, such that even Welch himself couldn't deal with it when he was CEO in the 80s and 90s.