The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Roiders News.

It's the end of an era for America's venerable conglomerate General Electric, plus the latest

from the COP 26th climate shindig in Scotland. Stay tuned. Welcome to the views. I'm Rob

Cox, the editor of Breaking Views, Financial Commentary Arm of Reuters News. I'm coming to you from Zurich after a week spent in Glasgow at the UN Climate Conference. More on that later. First, I talked to John Foley, our U.S. editor, about General Electric's decision to break into three companies. It's not a surprising move. Larry Culp, the CEO, has been nudging the

company towards some sort of dismantling since taking over three years ago, but for long time,

GE watchers, it's certainly the end of an era. For decades, GE managers like Jack Welch and

Jeff Immold argued that their culture, discipline in six Sigma ways, allowed the company's disparate

businesses to create more value for shareholders than if they were run separately.

In reality, that hubris led the company to make a lot of dumb decisions, which are now being unwound.

After that, me and George Hay, who's still in Scotland at the cop, chew over some of the lessons learned from the second week of the climate conference.

In general, the first week was a bit more positive than the second

has been thus far in getting the world closer to keeping global warming

to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Give a listen.

John, so you wrote about what many people would describe as the end of an era,

the breakup of General Electric, the conglomerate,

into three component parts, as you

and I know this has been a long time coming, but they finally announced it.

So what's your sense of how we should read this?

Well, Rob, I think it's understandable that people think about this as the end of an era,

because G is nearly 120 years old but actually the

era that we're talking about ended ages ago right so like g g already is not the giant sprawling

...