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Summary: Share Jack Welch's adventure and learn from it!
Review: The thing that fascinated me most about this book, is the way in which Jack literally sweeps you along with his story-telling style. One almost feel as if you were there in person, standing next to Jack as he progressed up the corporate ladder.What also makes this book interesting, is the fact that, though you feel like you are reading a story, you learn something new on almost every page, almost without realizing that you are being taught by one of America's most admired businessmen.
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Summary: Ruthlessly Fortunate
Review: Jack very well incorporated the power of " selective evolution through periodic removal of the weakest links". But the big question remains : is that the only way for a company to be successfull?
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Summary: Welch¿s Long-lasting Contribution to Business Leadership
Review: Jack Welch, although the most well known CEO in Corporate America for decades, is going beyond his own myth in his autobiography. He has decided to get a better hold of his destiny by explaining himself to readers. Welch shares with his audience some very interesting insights about his personality and management style that he has developed over time: self-confidence, self-respect, trust, toughness and aggressiveness as well as warmth and generosity. Welch, a star performer, realistically played the promotion game to climb to the top of GE. As CEO of GE for two decades, Welch proved many detractors wrong by turning a stodgy, bureaucratic manufacturing conglomerate into a very profitable, service-oriented constellation of companies sharing the same vision and values. Welch probably knows better than anybody else that the work of his life is unfinished business. Business is indeed a process of constant renewal.
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Summary: Trailblazer!
Review: Jack Welch is a trailblazer! This book is strong on the fundamentals: Integrity, hard work and resourcefulness! His ability to successfully multitask the growth of a corporation is astounding! Soothsayers and pundits across the world celebrate his success and ogle over GE's achievements!
All that glory seems secondary to Jack! He passionately talks about his jetsetting trips from Crotonville to Bangalore to Boca Raton spearheading the growth of a company through its people! People first, strategy second- He explains his inherent characteristic that recognizes competency in people. The moment his unassuming, globe trotting radar spots the high-soaring players, Jack pushes his luck every so often and seeks to energise & enervate the ability of these competent people to stretch! This approach, he says, creates "boundaryless" dynamos out of people who live his vision through their eyes. He creates an industry dwarfing service sector for his company out of thin air, he nudges his nuclear business to explore and thrive in new environments, he convinces the world that a manager of a core GE business can go onto becoming the longest serving CEO of a very successful network station! He backs a homegrown industrial diamond business that may soon turn this centuries old exclusive trade on its heels! He energizes the X-Ray & CAT-scan machine business to enervating levels that soars from a substandard 25,000 scans to a trailblazing 200,000 average scans! All these activities occur in the background of an S&P outperforming, monstrously growing GE Capital! Imagine a small-scale company coming out of humble beginnings in the 1930's as a financial company. Imagine its growth as a profit powerhouse that contributes 40% plus of GE' earnings and adds billions more in profit, circa 2000! You've got to figure Jack Welch has to be a driving factor in those calculations somewhere. Imagine a social architecture that boasts of the world's best analytical minds that have a common characteristic trait: 24 hours of sheer GE horsepower backed by integrity and committed resources! Crotonville is a lush greenhouse that roofs some of the world's most talented CEOs! Wendt, Dammerman, Nardelli, Immelt, Bossidy. The list is endless! Jack further demonstrates how one can take a company that is an American Icon and outperform the rest of the world's conglomerates by being boundaryless. Boundaryless means giving flight to one's ideas anywhere in the globe. Boundaryless means identifying GE as a global community- not an American corporation that subjugates continents and reports to $hungry Wall Street. Boundaryless means global accountability. Managers in China fill the same social stable that the American Managers fill. Bondarylessness extinguishes the turf wars that stunt growth. Japanese women move from one global deal to another electrifying the corporate atmosphere in the process! The Indian subcontinent is home to GE's largest research center. All these "boundaryless" businesses have created opportunities galore! Yet Jack has fired more often that hired! He has blasted more often than cheered! He has told more employees to go home than anybody else in the history of the modern American Corporation! "Ruthless Jack" might as well be another moniker for "Neutron Jack"! Monikers notwithstanding, Jack outlines the success paradigm that ensured the free flow of ideas truly transcending the shackles of bureaucracies, countries, religions or regions! GE is the global crown jewel - Jack's book gives you an inside on the legend that is GE!
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Summary: Where is your soul?
Review: I was a little disappointed by the focus of this book. I was expecting a little humanity and meaning in this tale of an extraordinary businessman. I hope that when the epitaph is carved on his gravestone it says more than "I bought and sold Companies" The lessons that are set forth in this book are not those that I would want my children to live their lives by. Being successful financially does not have to come at the expense of having a soul and valuing and honoring your family and community.
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Summary: Great Manager; Mediocre Book
Review: Jack Welch has a lot of interesting lessons he could have taught based on his outstanding career. Unfortunately, this book ends up being a long, anecdotal memoir that feels like it was rushed to print without sufficient editing. Lots of superflous details about golfing buddies and dinner parties; not enough about his innovations like "Six Sigma". Disappointing.
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Summary: Almost as good as "Who Moved my Cheese"
Review: I already admire N. Taleb's 'Fooled by Randomness' for illustrating the often indirect proportion of wealth to intelligence. My consideration for him and that book has doubled since I came across Jack. It's truly a wonder how someone with the managerial reputation of Jack Welch could write suich a book as this. It is badly written and is filled with ridiculous anectodes about football and golf - almost as much golf as that other classic business treatise ' Raving Fans'. Your mind wonders whether you're reading Joe Montana's or Nick Price 's biography. You'll also be fascinated and blown away by details of several meetings (if I talked like that at meetings I'd have had even worse luck at jobs than I already have) and hotel conference centers in such exciting places as Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Boca Raton - though he does also visit India. mr. Welch does not like Europeans much either because they prevent him from increasing his monopoly, although his right hand man wasthe very Italian Paolo fresco for many years.
The dilemma you face now is: Do I buy 'Jack' or 'Who moved my Cheese". it's a difficult choice which one will offer more jokes at parties ? Which is better when you run out of toilet paper ? Jack welch came to be known as Neutron Jack this book is 'electron Crap'. You want success in business? Be greedy.
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Summary: jack straight from the gut
Review: excellent review of a career and a man i have always admired.
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Summary: Impressive Career, Disappointing Life Story
Review: Mr. Welch was clearly a very fortunate businessman. He managed to leverage his good fortune with a style of leadership which maintained GE's strong status. I was sadden, however, with how he dealt with his life. Almost everything Mr. Welch writes of deals with powerful yet simple business concepts and a tiresome list of acquisitions and divestitures. I'd like to understand more of Mr. Welch as a human being - not the simple-minded businessman who dismisses his relationship with his first wife in a page. Although the book seems to indicate otherwise, I hope his life meant more than GE.
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Summary: Knowledge@Wharton: Life According to Jack
Review: ... "Whirlwind" is defined as, among other things, "a tumultuous rush." That definition aptly describes life with Jack Welch as depicted in his heavily hyped autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut. Throughout his 40 years with General Electric, and especially in his 20 years as the company’s chief executive, Welch was in constant motion, prodding the lumbering bureaucracy he inherited on his accession to the top job in 1981 to become limber, lean and even lithe. By every standard metric, Welch was remarkably successful. Under his leadership, GE grew to become one of the world’s largest, most profitable companies. What was even more remarkable was Welch’s ability to produce such extraordinary results year after year. More than 75% of the corporations that were part of the Fortune 500 50 years ago are gone, yet GE continues to glow. There is more here than we either need or want to know. He was paid to write about his 20 years at the helm of General Electric, and that is what we get. The writing is often poor, the book jumps all over the place and facts get muddled here and there. The skilled hand of his collaborator, John A. Byrne, a senior writer at Business Week and author of a number of excellent business books, is not all that apparent. But none of that really matters. We wanted Jack and this book gives him to us. What we learn is that Jack started out in life as a relatively ordinary guy, with average intelligence and average prospects. He had a normal childhood, a devoted mother, and a good, if detached, father. But somewhere along the line he developed a hunger, not for success or money (although those both came in abundance), as much as for ways to improve: improve products, processes and people, as well as himself. His hunger turned into an insatiable appetite once he joined stolid, stodgy General Electric in 1961. Within a very short time, he literally blew things up, albeit unintentionally, as he sought to find a way to improve the production of plastic. He shares with us his various recipes for success, beginning with his strategy that every GE product should either be "Number 1, Number 2, or abandoned." Many companies still follow that recipe, long after GE refined it once Welch learned that many of the company’s managers were defining their markets so narrowly that virtually every product became number 1. Welch then told his managers to redefine markets so that each product had no more than a 10% market share. That simple directive opened the way for enormous gains over the past decade. "Markets aren’t mature. Sometimes minds are … When we asked each business to redefine its market so that they could have no more than a 10% share, what had looked like mature markets became growth opportunities. Even a few field horses started looking like thoroughbreds." Perhaps Welch’s most successful initiative came in the mid-1990s, when he pushed the concept of "boundaryless organization." Knowledge and information have increasingly become a company’s most important strategic resource. Unhappily, the aphorism "knowledge is power" is all too true in large organizations, where information becomes sticky as even managers within the same division find themselves reluctant to share or transfer knowledge. Welch developed ways to eliminate the barriers that kept knowledge from being shared widely, including his well-known "work-out" sessions. "Taking everyone’s best ideas and transferring them to others is the secret. There is nothing more important." But there is also nothing more difficult, as Welch found out. Welch loved throwing old nostrums of business overboard. He relished intellectual combat, challenging the ideas others generated, not in an effort to impose his own ideas, but to hone the development of the idea that was best for the company. He readily admits that not all his ideas were winners. He celebrated the occasional misstep, as well as the successes. He knew how important it was to encourage people to try and to take risks. What comes through in this book, and may be the key to his success, is that Welch genuinely likes people, and believed in every one of the 300,000 employees of the company. Yes, he could be demanding, direct and blunt, but employees rarely misunderstood him. People were not just fungible goods, resources to be used or gotten rid of; they were to be developed. "We ran the people factory to build great leaders." Welch may be one of the few CEOs to have raised the human resource department to a level equal with, if not a slight notch above, the operating divisions. He hammers home the theme: People make the difference. We hear that from many CEOs, but coming from Welch it has credibility. Like many other successful CEOs, he was highly competitive, smart, and devoted to the company. But most important, he was devoted to the people who worked for the company. Welch spent his 20 years as CEO to "making sure everybody counts - and everybody knows they count." For Welch, formality, titles and hierarchy were not what mattered. "Passion, chemistry and idea flow from any level at any place are what matter. Everybody’s welcome and expected to go at it." The mantra that drove Jack throughout his career and made him one of the world’s most successful and admired executives seems to have been a slight and elegantly simple variation on GE’s slogan: "We bring good people to life."
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