Review Summary: This autobiography of Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001, primarily focuses on the key initiatives (such as focusing on businesses with #1 or #2 market shares, selecting the best executive prospects, creating a learning organization, expanding GE Capital, Six Sigma, e-business development, and the attempted acquisition of Honeywell) during his tenure as CEO.The key principles behind his successful management style are spread throughout the book and summarized in part of chapter 24, What This CEO Thing Is All About.
In most chapters, he briefly highlights the history and thinking that led to the initiative, shares a few examples of what went right and wrong, explains what his thoughts were while the initiative was occurring, and provides a scorecard for GE's performance.
What will be new to most people are a deeper exposure to his communications style, a balancing of what the popular press has said about events during his tenure, and a stronger flavor of his focus on improving the quality of GE's management teams.
The roots of his successful approaches will be easily found in the example of his mother, and his early experiences at GE.
Those who are looking for a management book will be disappointed in the volume.
Readers who want a lot more detail on the specific successes will often be disappointed as well. The book is very candid, but typically operates at a pretty superficial level.
Review: The bulk of this book is framed by the experience of being welcomed as CEO and being given a hug by his predecessor, Reg Jones, and doing the same for his successor, Jeff Immelt. Jack Welch feels that in between those events he helped create "the greatest people factory in the world, a learning enterprise with a boundaryless culture." In looking back on his role, he sees it as being 75 percent about people, and 25 percent about everything else.
The author's profits from this book are being donated to charity.
As someone who made his share of mistakes along the way (including blowing up a small chemical factory with an experiment early in his tenure at GE), Dr. Welch is aware of the need to recognize those who take big swings and miss the ball. Having grown up in the small plastics business in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he also strove to maintain that kind environment on a bigger scale. His characterizations of himself are brutally frank prior to becoming CEO, and less so thereafter. One story that most will remember is how his mother upbraided him in the locker room for throwing his stick after the team lost its seventh straight hockey game in overtime.
He offers a lot of arguments for his views that are not always balanced by the views of others. He is defensive about his reputation for cutting jobs, but argues that he was doing what was needed. His self assessment is that he was slow to act. On contamination of the Hudson by PCBs, he is proud of GE's record and feels victimized by government. He asserts that all evidence to the contrary is just plain wrong.
What is my view of the most positive legacy of Jack Welch, after reading this book? He made important contributions in at least these areas:
(1) Creating a helpful model for how to locate, encourage, and develop managers with the right values and the ability to deliver good business results.
(2) Showing how to develop a financial services business from a manufacturing company base, something that has rarely been done successfully.
(3) Establishing a helpful example for how to change the management style of a major company away from centralized bureaucracies.
That's quite a lot compared with his contemporaries. Congratulations, Dr. Welch!
As a book about how to manage, few will find this more than a two or three star effort . . . but that was not the book's purpose. As an autobiography, few insights are present past chapter six, and all of the anecdotes about the initiatives while he was CEO simply retell the same story of a bright, results-oriented man who was constantly looking for a better way. In terms of being an autobiography, more than half the book could have been edited out. As a result of too much rambling at a superficial level, this is a three star autobiography. Clearly, Dr. Welch himself is a five-star effort. I combined these perspectives to assign the book a three star rating. Those who look at the book carefully in the absence of considering his track record may feel that I am too generous. A lot of his Deep Dives into the organization will impress many readers as little more than meddling micromanagement by someone with a very large ego.
After you read this book, I encourage you to think about what you would want to be able to say about yourself in an autobiography when you retire. What will your positive legacy be? How will people who don't know you perceive what you have to say about what you did and thought?
Work on improving yourself as the first step towards organizational progress!
