Jack: Straight from the Gut

Jack: Straight from the Gut

Jack: Straight from the Gut

Jack: Straight from the Gut

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

The most widely respected CEO in America looks back on his brilliant career at General Electric and reveals his personal business philosophy and unique managerial style.


Nearly 20 years ago, former General Electric CEO Reg Jones walked into Jack Welch's office and wrapped him in a bear hug. "Congratulations, Mr. Chairman," said Reg. It was a defining moment for American business. So begins the story of a self-made man and a self-described rebel who thrived in one of the most volatile and economically robust eras in U.S. history, while managing to maintain a unique leadership style. In what is the most anticipated book on business management for our time, Jack Welch surveys the landscape of his career running one of the world's largest and most successful corporations.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780446690683
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Publication date: 10/01/2003
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 496
Sales rank: 321,710
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.38(d)

About the Author

Jack Welch joined GE in 1960. In 1981, he became the eighth chairman and CEO. He lives in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Read an Excerpt

Building Self-Confidence

It was the final hockey game of a lousy season. We had won the first three games in my senior year at Salem High School, beating Danvers, Revere, and Marblehead, but had then lost the next half dozen games, five of them by a single goal. So we badly wanted to win this last one at the Lynn Arena against our archrival Beverly High. As co-captain of the team, the Salem Witches, I had scored a couple of goals, and we were feeling pretty good about our chances.

It was a good game, pushed into overtime at 2-2.

But very quickly, the other team scored and we lost again, for the seventh time in a row. In a fit of frustration, I flung my hockey stick across the ice of the arena, skated after it, and headed back to the locker room. The team was already there, taking off their skates and uniforms. All of a sudden, the door opened and my Irish mother strode in.

The place fell silent. Every eye was glued on this middle-aged woman in a floral-patterned dress as she walked across the floor, past the wooden benches where some of the guys were already changing. She went right for me, grabbing the top of my uniform.

"You punk!" she shouted in my face. "If you don't know how to lose, you'll never know how to win. If you don't know this, you shouldn't be playing."

I was mortified—in front of my friends—but what she said never left me. The passion, the energy, the disappointment, and the love she demonstrated by pushing her way into that locker room was my mom. She was the most influential person in my life. Grace Welch taught me the value of competition, just as she taught me the pleasure of winning and the need to take defeat in stride.

If I have any leadership style, a way of getting the best out of people, I owe it to her. Tough and aggressive, warm and generous, she was a great judge of character. She always had opinions of the people she met. She could "smell a phony a mile away."

She was extremely compassionate and generous to friends. If a relative or neighbor visited the house and complimented her on the water glasses in the breakfront, she wouldn't hesitate to give them away.

On the other hand, if you crossed her, watch out. She could hold a grudge against anyone who betrayed her trust. I could just as easily be describing myself.

And many of my basic management beliefs—things like competing hard to win, facing reality, motivating people by alternately hugging and kicking them, setting stretch goals, and relentlessly following up on people to make sure things get done—can be traced to her as well. The insights she drilled into me never faded. She always insisted on facing the facts of a situation. One of her favorite expressions was "Don't kid yourself. That's the way it is."

"If you don't study," she often warned, "you'll be nothing. Absolutely nothing. There are no shortcuts. Don't kid yourself!"

Those are blunt, unyielding admonitions that ring in my head every day. Whenever I try to delude myself that a deal or business problem will miraculously improve, her words set me straight.

From my earliest years in school, she taught me the need to excel. She knew how to be tough with me, but also how to hug and kiss. She made sure I knew how wanted and loved I was. I'd come home with four As and a B on my report card, and my mother would want to know why I got the B. But she would always end the conversation congratulating and hugging me for the As.

She checked constantly to see if I did my homework, in much the same way that I continually follow up at work today. I can remember sitting in my upstairs bedroom, working away on the day's homework, only to hear her voice rising from the living room: "Have you done it yet? You better not come down until you've finished!"

But it was over the kitchen table, playing gin rummy with her, that I learned the fun and joy of competition. I remember racing across the street from the schoolyard for lunch when I was in the first grade, itching for the chance to play gin rummy with her. When she beat me, which was often, she'd put the winning cards on the table and shout, "Gin!" I'd get so mad, but I couldn't wait to come home again and get the chance to beat her.

That was probably the start of my competitiveness, on the baseball diamond, the hockey rink, the golf course, and business.

Perhaps the greatest single gift she gave me was self-confidence. It's what I've looked for and tried to build in every executive who has ever worked with me. Confidence gives you courage and extends your reach. It lets you take greater risks and achieve far more than you ever thought possible. Building self-confidence in others is a huge part of leadership. It comes from providing opportunities and challenges for people to do things they never imagined they could do—rewarding them after each success in every way possible.

My mother never managed people, but she knew all about building self-esteem. I grew up with a speech impediment, a stammer that wouldn't go away. Sometimes it led to comical, if not embarrassing, incidents. In college, I often ordered a tuna fish on white toast on Fridays when Catholics in those days couldn't eat meat. Inevitably, the waitress would return with not one but a pair of sandwiches, having heard my order as "tu-tuna sandwiches."

My mother served up the perfect excuse for my stuttering. "It's because you're so smart," she would tell me. "No one's tongue could keep up with a brain like yours." For years, in fact, I never worried about my stammer. I believed what she told me: that my mind worked faster than my mouth.

I didn't understand for many years just how much confidence she poured into me. Decades later, when looking at early pictures of me on my sports teams, I was amazed to see that almost always I was the shortest and smallest kid in the picture. In grade school, where I played guard on the basketball squad, I was almost three-quarters the size of several of the other players.

Yet I never knew it or felt it. Today, I look at those pictures and laugh at what a little shrimp I was. It's just ridiculous that I wasn't more conscious of my size. That tells you what a mother can do for you. She gave me that much confidence. She convinced me that I could be anyone I wanted to be. It was really up to me. "You just have to go for it," she would say.

Copyright © 2001 by John F. Welch, Jr.

Table of Contents

Author's Note
Prologue
Section I: EARLY YEARS
1. Building Self- Confidence
2. Getting Out of the Pile
3. Blowing the Roof Off
4. Flying Below the Radar
5. Getting Closer to the Big Leagues
6. Swimming in a Bigger Pond

Section II: BUILDING A PHILOSOPHY
7. Dealing with Reality and "Superficial Congeniality"
8. The Vision Thing
9. The Neuron Years
10. The RCA Deal
11. The People Factory
12. Remaking Crotonville to Remake GE
13. Boundaryless: Taking Ideas to the Bottom Line
14. Deep Dives

Section III: UPS AND DOWNS
15. Too Full of Myself
16. GE Capital: The Growth Engine
17. Mixing NBC with Light Bulbs
18. When to Fight, When to Fold

Section IV: GAME CHANGERS
19. Globalization
20. Growing Services
21. Six Sigma and Beyond
22. E-Business

Section V: LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD
23. "Go Home, Mr. Welch"
24. What This CEO Thing is All About
25. A Short Reflection on Golf
26. "New Guy"

Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendixes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Michael D. Eisner

Michael D. Eisner, Chairman and CEO, The Walt Disney Company
Jack... took an industrial giant and turned it into an industrial colossus with a heart and a soul and a brain.

Nobuyuki ldei

Nobuyuki Idei, Chairman and CEO, Sony Corporation
Jack Welch...has finally disclosed his mysteries of management...

Bernadine Healy

Bernadine Healy, M.D., President and CEO, American Red Cross
An American treasure... teaches us how a leader with keen intellect, guts, and honor can impart courage to people around him...

Thomas Middelhoff

Dr. Thomas Middelhoff, Chairman of the Board, Bertelsmann AG
Jack's vision and courage... and, of course, his success, make him the role model of entrepreneurs and managers worldwide.

Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett, Chairman, Berkshire Hathaway
All CEOs want to emulate him... they'll come closer if they listen carefully to what he has to say.

Michael Eisner

Jack...took an industrial giant and turned it into an industrial colossus with a heart and a soul and a brain. (Chairman and CEO, The Walt Disney Company)

Interviews

Exclusive Author Essay
Reflections on Writing Jack: Straight from the Gut

Many have asked why I decided to write a book. The truth is, people have been after me for years to do a book. I never really had any interest in it until I got a great reaction to a story written about GE and me in Business Week magazine a few years ago. Hundreds of total strangers wrote letters to me. Many of them described the organizational pressures they felt to become someone they weren't in order to be successful. They liked the story's contention that I never changed who I was. The reaction made me think that my story might be worth telling. I asked John Byrne, the writer of the Business Week story, to help me. John agreed, and we started the project about a little over a year ago.

Writing a book is like nothing I've ever done. It was a killer, really hard. I don't think I ever worked so hard in my life. At one point, I even gave up golf for something like three months. But it also gave me the chance to reflect on my career and my experiences. I wanted to share them with people who would be interested in knowing what it was like, and I thought others might find some of the ideas helpful.

John and I had a couple of goals in mind from the start. I didn't want this book to be a chest-thumping exercise. It was difficult to write the word "I" when everything I ever accomplished was done through other people. At first, I thought it could be a book about all the mistakes I've made. I've made a ton of them and have learned a lot from them. But everyone agreed we wouldn't be able to sustain an entire book on just mistakes. I knew one thing for sure. I didn't want anything in the book that sounded pompous or preachy. I wanted to tell a simple story about a guy from Salem, Massachusetts, who got lucky in life, and I wanted to explain in more detail some of the ideas that helped me at GE.

I never imagined I'd be so lucky in life. It's like God came down and said, "Jack, here is your moment. Take it." I couldn't believe I was paid to have so much fun and to do so many wonderful things. Neither could my mother when she was alive. When I went to Europe for the very first time in 1964 on a business trip, she was petrified that GE wouldn't reimburse me. "Are you sure they are going to pay you for it?" she asked, over and over again.

She was a powerful force in my life. She taught me the importance of self-confidence, something covered in the book. I think it had a lot to do with my success. Building self-confidence in people, giving them candid feedback and constant appraisal, rewarding and celebrating their successes, are all major ingredients of creating a great organization. It's what my mother taught me at 15 Lovett St. in Salem, where I grew up. It's what I tried to do throughout my life. A manager's job is to give people the opportunity to stretch and become more confident.

It helped that I began my career at GE in a start-up environment outside the mainstream of the company in plastics. I loved the informal atmosphere we had in that business in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Informality liberates people to do more and to do it faster all the time. When I became chairman in 1981, I tried to run the business like a corner grocery store where everyone's opinions counted regardless of their titles. One of a manager's jobs is to excite everyone by the opportunities change provides and to let no one be paralyzed by its challenges. We need to always show people that they can do more than they ever thought possible and let them enjoy the exhilaration from their successes. If there's anything I'm really proud of it's seeing so many people stretch and accomplish things they never thought possible. GE is a people factory. It's a company that develops great people who make great products and services and at the same time achieve their personal dreams. I tried to get at this in the book.

As I leave GE, after more than 40 years at the company, I know I'll really miss the people and the wonderful friendships. I'm excited by the great things my successor, Jeff Immelt, and all the GE people will do in the future. It's a real thrill to me to know that GE's best days are ahead of it. I'll be cheering from the sidelines, and over the next few months at least, I'll be trying to get people to buy this book. (Jack Welch)

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