Applying Jack Welch’s business strategies to rural Georgia

The Georgia General Assembly convenes in Atlanta next Monday for its 157th session.  Naturally, this got me to thinking about Jack Welch.

Well, maybe not naturally.  The logic was admittedly a little circuitous.  Focused as I am on the economic, educational and population health hellscape that is now much of rural Georgia, I was wondering what the legislature might try this year to make life a little better for the several million Georgians who live in rural counties.  

Then my mind wandered back to a time when candidates for state office, Republicans especially, bleated about running government like a business.  Initially I thought that was one of the dumber campaign pledges I’d ever heard (which, for our legislature, is saying something). 

But now I think maybe they were on to something.  Which is how I got to Jack Welch.

Welch, as a few readers might be old enough to remember, was the chief executive officer of General Electric back in the 1980s and widely regarded as the GOAT of American CEOs, at least for that era.

At GE, he implemented what he called his “Fix, Sell or Close” strategy.  If any of GE’s business units weren’t No. 1 or No. 2 in their market space, their executives were given a certain amount of time to make improvements and get them into at least second place.  

If they couldn’t do that, the next option was to sell them.  And if that didn’t work, they just closed them down.  

According to one case study I unearthed on the World Wide Web, Welch sold or shut down more than 200 GE business units in the ‘80s and freed up $11 billion in cash (which, back then, was real money).

Welch died in 2001 and, sadly, is no longer around to help us figure out what to do with Georgia’s, umm, underperforming counties.  Selling them would be no sure thing.  I doubt we could talk Alabama or Florida into taking Southwest Georgia (aka SOWEGA) off our hands.

Which leaves us with the option of closing them down.  That is, of course, easier said than done when it comes to governmental entities like cities and counties.  

But it’s not a new idea.  Back in the 1980s, Kil Townsend, a Republican House member from Buckhead, proposed cutting the number of Georgia counties down to about 90 from 159.  

“They have no reason to exist,” Townsend told an interviewer from the Richard B. Russell Special Collections Library in 2006. “They have two or three thousand people, no business, no jobs, no health, no education, no law enforcement, really…” Georgia ranked close to the bottom nationally in education, he added, “because who’s going to teach in Podunk County with a bunch of illiterate parents (who are) uninterested in education?”

I haven’t been able to find any old newspaper clips recounting Townsend’s actual speeches and presentations to rural Georgia leaders and residents, but I’m guessing he took a subtler approach in, say, Eastman and Alamo.  It is, however, worth noting that the state’s Democratic governor at the time, Joe Frank Harris, wouldn’t let Townsend venture much south of Macon without State Patrol protection.  Legend has it he needed it on a few occasions.

Suffice to say that Townsend and Welch would have been comrades in any effort to deal with the Georgia counties that have fallen into the bottom national ranks in any important metric you can think of, including economic opportunity and prosperity, educational achievement, and health outcomes.  

It’s not difficult to imagine much of South Georgia simply disappearing from state maps under their regime.  This would, of course, free up zillions of dollars to deal with Metro Atlanta’s traffic problems, but this is where hard-headed business decision-making collides with the Georgia constitution and, more importantly, rural politics.  You can’t just wave a magic wand and make, say, Wheeler County disappear (as appealing a prospect as that might be).

I’m obviously having some fun with this, but I’m going to end on a serious note.  It shouldn’t be unreasonable for the state government (not to mention the economically productive counties that are subsidizing rural Georgia) to expect some level of fiscal competence on the part of local governments.  Whenever a new municipality is proposed, the General Assembly wisely requires a viability study.  Will the new city have a sufficient tax base?  What about population?  Is it growing?  And what impact will its creation have on other governmental jurisdictions?

And therein lies my serious suggestion for the 157th General Assembly: Conduct viability assessments on every county in Georgia.  How much is their tax base growing each year?  How about their economies?  (By my count, 54 counties saw their local GDPs shrink in 2022, the latest year for which we have county-level data.)  What about population growth?  In 2023, 93 of Georgia’s 159 counties had more deaths than births.

In other words, gather the kind of data you need to make rational business decisions about rural areas.

That seems to me to be a good step toward running government like a business. I’d like to think Jack Welch and Kil Townsend would agree.

Charles Hayslett is the author of the long-running troubleingodscountry.com blog.  He is also the Scholar in Residence at the Center for Middle Georgia Studies at Middle Georgia State University.  The views expressed in his columns are his own and are not necessarily those of the Center or the University.