GE and the Belief in Management Magic

This report describes the history that led to GE's decision to split into three companies (WSJ Nov. 2021). To me the attitude at GE contrasts with Porter's definition of strategy. Here are some money quotes:

1. GE’s corporate culture prided itself on elevating management to a kind of science. The dissolution of the company, however, points to a reality many executives don’t like to admit:
   
   Management matters a lot, but it doesn’t matter as much as you think (especially if you are management).
2. Business historian Leslie Hannah, analyzing the 100 companies that had the largest stock-market value in 1912, found that only 21% remained among the top 100 in 1995. Almost half had disappeared ...
3. The struggle to integrate some of those lumbering acquisitions, and sluggish growth elsewhere at the company, forced GE Capital to become ultra-aggressive. Management had no choice; smooth earnings growth had to come from somewhere when other parts of the company were faltering. GE Capital “could get higher returns only by shouldering more risk,”
4. Decades of success had bred complacency. Rita McGrath is a management professor at Columbia Business School who studies corporate change and has consulted for GE. In the early 2000s, she says, a common attitude among the company’s managers was: “It doesn’t matter what we make; it’s how we manage.”
   
   GE was betting that “management technology would always save them,” she says.
5. But a management system optimized for wringing out incremental efficiencies couldn’t make the leap from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.
6. So industrial conglomerates are on the wane, at least for now. The myth that great management can always work miracles should be, too.