Jack Welch at GE

everything we are doing in the search service arena has the potential to be another service shot Jack Welch is known as a tough CEO demanding visionary brutally frank welt was an only child born in 1935 in Salem Massachusetts his mother instilled in him a passion for learning in sports Welch's father big Jack was a train conductor after high school where Welch was captain of a hockey team and co-captain of a golf team he studied chemical engineering at the University of Massachusetts and earned his PhD at the University of Illinois Wells joined General Electric's plastics division at age 25 before rapidly moving up the ranks the case for change in General Electric is absolutely clear Jack Welch was a surprise choice for the top job at GE but from the second he took the reins in 1981 the place has never been the same it's very hard to tinker with success but but Jack didn't just tinker with it I mean he went in there broke the place Welch took a company that was already a powerhouse and made it leaner stronger and more diversified cutting the fat came first welts trimmed about 170,000 jobs more than 40% of the workforce earning him the nickname he dislikes Neutron Jack then he ranked employees annually for the bottom 10% getting pink slips we grade people on the bottom ten middle seventy and top 20 and we do it every single year we do it rigorously now people can move from middle 70 to the top 20 of the top 20 down the middle 70 to make the company stronger Welch insisted that every GE business had to be first or second in its market or be fixed or sold when Jack Welch took over in 1981 GE still concentrated on the traditional manufacturing which had long ago made the company part of America's industrial establishment he decided that if GE were to overcome increasing global competition only the companies which were first or second in their leagues should be allowed to survive its policy for the others were simple fix clothes or sell he wanted GE to be the best is judgement that third rank performers would hold it back came from his own time in the company I would say my experience with being in running some businesses in GE that were number one and some businesses that were number four and five so I had the luxury of a laboratory in G I ran the electronic components business the motor business the medical business the plastics business all at once so I saw this group of businesses some which were leaders and some which were big followers and it was clear to me that one was a hell of a lot easier and a hell of a lot better than the other one and the other one didn't have the resources and the muscle and the power to compete on a global scale that was emerging in the decade of the eighties and fusing the workforce to adapt was only one prong of Jack Welch's strategy for change the other was to improve the overall competitive position of GE by selling the companies he didn't think were going to be profitable enough and buying others I would say that his strength is that he he looks at everything from the viewpoint of a corporate head who wants to get the maximum profit out for the court well the corporation has been successful during mulches tenure GE acquired 934 company today GE offers an astonishing array of products and services from aircraft engines power generators and locomotives to medical equipment and household appliances to financial services to NBC an unusual addition that made sense to Welch high cash flow grows great people bazaars for GA why would you not be in it well we would have liked to have bought NBC in that period but we didn't want to buy the whole the whole was RCA but he was bigger and he was able to absorb the whole thing and had a better vision than I did Welch's vision led to four major initiatives during his tenure one was the Six Sigma program to improve quality that defines our job finding a better way every day sounds and slogan but it's the way we work one speed some important well because you got a competitive world that you've got to get the product at the right time at the right price to the right person fast you've got to be able to do that you've got to be able to respond if I call you and you you you tell me I'll get back here in a couple of weeks well if you're a consultant or if you're a supplier of goods you'll you'll be able to fill the oil on in four weeks somebody else will fill it in four hours so speed service ability to change the fast moving markets is absolutely critical he is General Electric he is GE it is his it is built in his image and a reflection of his character a charming bright driving aggressive macho man Jack will tell you point blank what he thinks sometimes he's brutally frank but I prefer that to someone who tries to slide and slip and slide around an issue the company which Jack Welsh inherited in the 1980s had long become used to a climate of apparently continual expansion consumption and growth in his first five years as the boss of GE Jack Welsh made more changes than had been in the previous 100 years of the company's history downsizing was aimed at preparing the company for increasing change the other half of the GE strategy was to move away from work which was labor-intensive over a span of a decade we downsized our operations that we do now we kept the high value-added manufacturing the sophisticated tooling the sophisticated machining etc but we got rid of some of the more mundane work that was taking place in the corporation and generating the one of the cornerstones of GES new management style is what Jack Welsh has called the work out it's a system of meetings at all GE plants where employees argue about ideas and take decisions which were once taken only by management of approaches the goals of the workout system are the objectives Jack Welsh has sex for the company he hopes ge will become less bureaucracy more informal more informal a company that allowed ideas to come from everywhere where brainpower and ideas counted more than title and control where more and more people were enriched during their work day to take something home to their life outside the job where the whole experience was integrated we're coming to work is a fun it's a fun thing for me it always has been I'd like it to be a fun thing for lots of people preferably 240,000 people where it isn't treachery where it isn't difficult as manager telling them what to do where they're in there with their ideas and they know their ideas count what this means in practice is that the 400 workers at this GE magnet plant in South Carolina for instance are divided into 35 teams each with an elected coach there are unions in other GE plants but none here the teams have to meet regularly they discuss production targets for the body scanners they're making and deal with any problems the members want to raise here workout seems to work well we work better together we have a little more say so and what's going on around know more what's going on around them and it's just all together different it's a different atmosphere and everything because we don't feel like we have anybody looking down our neck on time we get our work happy with this wall anywhere it's changed a lot of clothes on me being able to like give out job assignments to people and be my own boss they don't be standing over you like they used to do when we first started here tell you everything what you're doing with time and because if you get to go to stuff ourselves I've been here 20 years and I feel relaxed I feel real relaxed about doing my job because I don't have to be if I'm doing something and I don't like it I can get something done about it and that that make me work harder and I feel better towards my company towards everybody according to mr. Welch all the changes which he's brought about to GE and to the company's employees are not just a byproduct of management theory or rhetoric they're justified by results look at the productivity look at the success of this company a lot of people we didn't get it get this by anything more than more and more people's ideas as the workout thing has grown so is the productivity now maybe it's a car maybe it's a freak correlation maybe it's just that then it doesn't really go together I'm not going to worry about whether it goes together or not the company is getting better it's getting faster inventories are turning faster new products are coming out that faster productivity is growing we're working capital is turning over next came globalization with more than 40 percent of revenues now coming from abroad then he grew services like finance and insurance to 70% of gigi's revenues today we've been growing 20 billion plus a year at failing hope we've been adding one of those in year for the last four years most recently with digitization every G division grew its own web Enterprise earning Jackie new moniker ejack I'd like to get some fresh thinking from you well chat a passion for training future leaders at is Croton ville leadership center much is dislike of bureaucracy led him to encourage any company employee to contribute new ideas jack has really developed 400 hitters and and that's a talent I don't have at General Electric Welch raise eyebrows by encouraging staff to cut bureaucracy face reality and live their dreams but his innovations help GE become the world's most admired company in Welsh the world's most admired CEO his secret great leadership skills down to a feisty lots of energy a lot of age a lot of humility yet a lot of pride hit a number of things that change the way you run business in the world at night at least in this country Larry boss said he worked under Welch at GE then left to run allied signal and briefly Honeywell the company Welch just bought if you were to rank Jack Welch and a list of business men in the last 50 years where would he rank I think Jack would be one in the in the second person would be far distant second you could argue that were the most competitive country in the world oh well it isn't all attributable to Jack but I think he's done a lot of things that other people have emulated in businesses that gets us to that position of being the most competitive when Wells retired in September 2001 General Electric was the world's most valuable company in terms of market capitalization what's your legacy of 20 years at GE what is it if I had to say what it was I would I would say we took an old-style military industrial highly structured enterprise and created an informal atmosphere where everyone had a shot at reaching their dreams a meritocracy it didn't look at race agenda or country of origin and gave everybody a shot that did as much as you possibly could to get bureaucracy out we came to work every day open to ideas from anywhere trying to create the atmosphere of the informal corner grocery store in a large business a family business that didn't count where you came from a how many stripes you having on your shoulders it was all about you your ideas in your dreams with the sky being delivered

Channel: Samatvam Academy

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Id: rADedqrVqSI

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/estpenis]

I type him as batshit insane

[u/ahomelessguy25]

I can empathize with the desire to not be associated with Jack Welch, but sadly, I think he was an ENTJ.