My personal opinion is that Jack Welch putting HR in charge of GE was his biggest mistake. Late in his tenure he realized that holding managers to numbers had reached it's end and decided to make his next set of promotions and demotions based on Cultural Values as scored by HR. He then put HR in charge of the succession process thus cementing his mistake. The idiocy of Beth Comstock et. al. just follows as a matter of course.
Here is what Jordan Peterson (of internet fame) has recently said,
COWEN: If we turn to senior management of large American companies, as a class of people — and I know it’s hard to generalize — but what do you see them as just not getting?
PETERSON: I would caution them not to underestimate the danger of their human resources departments.
COWEN: Say more.
PETERSON: Yeah, well, because I see that the social justice etiology that’s destroyed a huge swath of academia is on the march in a major way through corporate America. And if the corporate people think they’re immune to it, they’ve got another think coming. It’s not like they’re any smarter than the universities.
COWEN: And who gave the HR department so much power? How did that happen? What myth did we follow that led us wrong?
PETERSON: That’s a good question because they had virtually no power to begin with, right? HR departments have always been underpowered, so to speak.
COWEN: Sure, of course.
PETERSON: Yeah, well, all of a sudden now, they’ve become ethics departments. And people who take to themselves the right to determine the propriety of ethical conduct end up with a lot more power — especially if you cede it to them — than you think. And that’s happening at a very rapid rate.
The doctrines that are driving hiring decisions, for example — any emphasis, for example, on equity, or equality of outcome — it’s unbelievably dangerous. You don’t just pull that in and signal to society that you’re now acting virtuously without bringing in the whole pathological ideology.
And look out when you do, because it’s like, there are elements of it that are extraordinarily old, and that would be the resentful element in terms of patterns of thinking. But the collectivist ethos is very, very attractive to people, so you have to be very careful of it.
Having HR decide what GE should look like is the root of all it's problems. The actor-managers, the superficiality, the inability to asses technical issues, etc. etc. is because that's what HR wants.