Everybody hurts. The Hindenburg is imploding. We’re up, we’re down, we’re up, we’re down. And nobody knows what’s going on. Oh, the humanity!

As the machine creaks to earth spewing hot gas, those who rigged it up to blow continue to do their jobs to help it do so. When things looked good, they honked their horns and smashed their drums and marched down the Street like hopped-up tweakers at a perpetual Mardi Gras. The Dow at 36,000! There’s no downside in YOUR COMPANY HERE.

The street musicians, drunks and satyrs have awakened to the smell of a dark and rainy morning. So now they perform as required. The Dow at 5000! There’s no upside in YOUR COMPANY/SECTOR/ENTIRE ECONOMY HERE. 

The analysts do their part. They come to work every morning and have to do something between breakfast, lunch and drinks. So they write their reports on every company in their sectors. YOUR COMPANY HERE is down! Revenues are flat! Boy, do they stink! Of course, yes, they’re part of the larger market, and the economy is sort of in free fall and the bears are running through the street eating all life forms in their path… but YOUR COMPANY HERE must be singled out. Why? Because it’s their job to single out YOUR COMPANY HERE. If they didn’t, what would they do all day?

The business reporters fall in line as well. They come to work every morning and have to do something between muffins, burgers and beers. So they cover the analysts who write the reports on YOUR COMPANY HERE, and the graphics guys work up their charts, which all look like a snowboarder’s dream, and yes, they put in a paragraph somewhere in there about how YOUR COMPANY HERE is part of the larger market, part of its segment, part of the meltdown of global capitalism, but they wouldn’t be doing their jobs unless they took apart YOUR COMPANY HERE when it was time to do so. And don’t forget the headline writers. In an atmosphere where it’s too depressing to read the stories, this is their time to shine.

Finally there are, of course, the guys who finance the deals. They’re taking the bailout money and working working working to count it, stack it, sock it away for an even rainier day. So no credit from them, nohow. No credit, no deals. No deals? What’s there to talk about? YOUR COMPANY HERE.

So wherever you go, there you are. Nobody can say we’re not all working as hard as little beavers.  At this point, however, maybe we should ask ourselves a question: wouldn’t we all be a lot better off if a whole strata of the infrastructure of investment capital simply knocked it off for a couple of months and let the fumes clear? Chewing away at our jobs as usual doesn’t seem to be doing anybody any good.

Macbeth said it. Act 5, Scene 5, I think. “It is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Most people think he was talking about Life. We know better. He was obviously talking about e-mail.

Take today, for instance. It’s only 8 AM and here’s what I have:

Some vendor I don’t know is asking me to upgrade a program I don’t own. An industry trade is sending me its daily morning newsletter. A magazine I don’t read is featuring its monthly lineup. The New York Times is sending me Today’s Headlines. Allposters.com tells me that for 48 hours only I can get up to 30% off on some posters I don’t want. Who gets posters? I don’t. Maybe one day a while ago I bought a poster for my kid. Now every day I get an offer about posters. I thought I spammed that. I guess I’ll do it again. Friggin’ Reunion.com won’t get off my back! There’s some guy in the Yukon Territory, I’m not making this up, who keeps searching my name. I don’t know anybody there, but he keeps searching me. And they keep telling me about it. When I try to exit their site, I get an error message! What a pain! I’ll send them to junk mail, too, except haven’t I already done that? Why do they keep coming back? Telecharge is offering me low-priced tickets to a show I don’t want to see… two newsletters I signed up for that have interesting stuff I’m not interested in… another newsletter! And another! News stories from all over. Gossip sites with their daily blab. Sales numbers! Hm. God. It’s rough out there and I don’t need a spreadsheet to tell me. More sales numbers. More news stories. Sales numbers. Request for approval on something I’ve already approved. A chain about nothingness on which I’m cc’d. Another of those. A self-congratulatory note masquerading as an attaboy. A blog. Another blog. And another. An ad pimping for an upcoming conference. And another. Who can afford to go to all these conferences in this economic environment? Oh look. Here’s a conference on the technology of conference calls. It’s in Park City, Utah! Gotta go to that, right? An ad from JetBlue. An ad from Restoration Hardware.

Finally I see there’s a draft of a document I need to read. At last! Content! Real, honest-to-God content! Except you know what? The guy’s assistant just dropped the hard copy on my desk fifteen minutes ago. So the purpose of the e-mail is unclear. Do I need an electronic document? In fact, why is any of this here? As far as I’m concerned, twenty years into the medium, legitimate uses for e-mail are limited to:

• making plans for meals, meetings, meetings over meals
• transmission of jokes and funny videos
• news alerts signifying the end of the world, which clearly is at hand
• orders from the boss
• information about upcoming parties
• data

Beyond that, I have a suggestion: We’re clearly into an era of downsizing. How about extending that trend to electronic transactions? I mean, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace, and all that. But does every last syllable of recorded time have to be documented?

This is just a note of condolence to Jeff Immelt. I have no comment or thought on the business difficulties being faced by General Electric right now, beyond to say that it’s a tough market, that everybody is in it, that nobody is feeling very good right now, and that I wish them long life and good future health as a shareholder.

Could they be doing something better? Maybe so and maybe not. There are certainly any number of brilliant, sagacious, perspicacious and audacious financial journalists sitting on their comfy fannies right now, pounding away on the poor multinational conglomerate, acute observers of the scene who are willing to offer their gaseous emissions on that subject, critics in the shadow of whose acumen I tremble.  So I’m going to let that be.

What I can tell you is how much tougher it makes it, when a company is in difficult circumstances, for a high-profile showboat former CEO to wade in and add to their troubles. You all know the story so far. GE (GE) fails to deliver its promised numbers, shocks the street, which is already in a state of mouth-breathing frenzy right now, shakes the foundations of global capitalism to the rafters, becomes the poster child for what-is-to-become-of-us thinking. That’s bad.

I can assure you – and I don’t know any of those guys personally over there – that nobody at that corporation was walking along whistling a happy tune as their particular crisis reared up and whacked them upside their organizational head.

Just as the most acute part of the media feeding frenzy was ebbing and the company was starting to get back down its knitting – here comes Jack Welch, the emblem of executive excellence and rigor for decades, a fine leader of that very company for a long, long time, and one of the most visible profiles in American business.

He jumps on the wounded animal’s back and starts hitting it over the head with his own very personal whammy stick. He is sure, he tells a somber gloom-meister on the Company’s proprietary cable network, that such a lapse in credibility and performance will never happen again… and that he would be prepared to take out a gun and shoot his hand-picked successor if it did. Waves of drool explode from the financial press and the news cycle starts again.

Ugh. I can tell you how that feels from the inside. It feels lousy. It feels like a guy you trusted and looked up to just put the last knife in to Caesar’s body. It feels like: Thanks, Brutus.

Was Jack helping GE by doing this? Is there any objective, rational reason that such statement be made as the company is trying to fight its way out of a problem that we are ALL suffering from at this point?

In a word, NO. Jack gets back into the headlines. Jack reminds us all of what a great CEO he was. Jack distances himself from the Company whose hardships he has no desire to be associated with. And in so doing, I think, he makes the final morph from business person to pundit.

Not a winning transformation this time around, is it.