Rating: 
Summary: Actionable ideas
Review: I love Jack Welch's book.It has lots of actionable ideas for those in small business,as well as those in corporate america.This is not a puff piece book.It is straight talk.A worthwhile buy for those who want to improve their business performance.
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Summary: Only Great Leaders Need Apply!
Review: I am a high school basketball coach and found this book to be both inspiring and educational. Jack Welch is one of the great corporate leaders of our time. He is quick with his tongue with subordinates ( sometimes too quick, he admits) yet seems to constantly get the most out of them. And these workers love him for it. This was one of the top three items I purchased on Amazon along with an excellent baseball video called "The 59 Minute Baseball Practice" and "Tuesday With Murray" which I read 5 times already.
Rating:
Summary: A Fantastic Read
Review: I hesitate to admit it here, but "Jack" was on sale in the Minneapolis airport before the official release date and I bought a copy. (Sorry Amazon --- I'll be ordering "Jack" as a Christmas gift for a number of friends and I'll click those into my Amazon shopping cart!) I fear my presentation to a conference the next morning may have lacked energy as I was up a good part of the night reading "Jack." Welch has given much to America and much to American business. Here is a gift from Jack to the rest of us and one we can pass onto our children. "Jack" is filled with wisdom, common sense and stories that teach and entertain. I doubt anyone reading "Jack" will become another Jack Welch. Even the great Welch can't create a clone through the written word. But I defy anyone to read even a single chapter and not become a better business person and a more effective manager. The lessons are exciting and stimulating. The book is an easy read. In short this is a fabulous book that like Jack Welch himself delivers.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Of Jack
Review: I've read five books about Jack Welch and "Straight From The Gut" completes my what I call my Jack Pack. This book tells the whole story and gives the reader the inside scoop. "Straight From The Gut" is the best of Jack Welch and I mean that straight from the heart.
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Summary: Thanks Jack
Review: As an author with my debut novel in its initial release, I genuinely enjoyed reading Jack Welch's autobiography, JACK: STRAIGHT FROM THE GUT. I realize I'm a biased reader, though. Jack made me some money. During the years Jack served as CEO of GE, I did hold some stock in his company. That stock did okay while he was in charge. But, so what? His book is still an enjoyable read. He tells how he succeeded in business by really trying. He stayed out of the pack and rose to the top. As an economics instructor, I found his observations about corporate culture and suggestions about managment style well worth the price of the book. He talks about some of his correct decisions as well as some of his mistakes. He reveals quite a bit of personality. I enjoyed this book. For an icon of contemporary American capitalism, Jack Welch is living a fairly interesting life.
Rating: 
Summary: Jack Has the Last Word
Review: 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 with "Congratulations, Mr. Chairman!" and 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. He notes in his opening remarks to "please remember that every time you see the word I in these pages, it refers to all those colleagues and friends [as well] . . . ." 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 create "a small company spirit in a big-company body." 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. "You punk, if you don't know how to lose, you'll never know how to win." As a young man at GE he says, "I was brutally honest and outspoken. I was impatient and, to many, abrasive . . . [which included being] earthy, loud, and excitable." Throughout the experience at GE, he feels that "I never changed who I was." 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 "I took too long 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!
Rating:
Summary: What a Life!
Review: The book jacket calls this a "deeply personal journey filled with passion and a sheer lust for life." Starting as an engineer at GE in 1960, he tried to stay out of the corporate bureaucracy while he ran a collection of GE businesses out of a Hilton in Massachusetts. For more than twenty years, he played in his home state until he was chosen by Reg Jones to be his successor there in Fairfield, Connecticut. A hug from Reg confirmed Jack as the new boss.
In the early days, he says, he was called a crazy, wild man. When he became CEO in 1981, Wall Street asked, "Jack who?" He showed them (in fact, the whole world_ "who indeed." He had said he wanted GE to become "the most competitive enterprise on earth." He had big plans and, like Marvin Runyon at TVA, he pared down employment at the expense of being liked. He acquired RCA but not Honeywell.
From the photo section, there is a pictorial record of his exploits and associations with some of the most important people in America. He is shown with Warren Buffet who he calls "the smartest guy in ANY room." He is shown with Bill Gates of Microsoft, both Presidents Bush, also Clinton, even Queen Elizabeth I (who appeared entranced by him.) In the '80s, he shakes hands with Russian Pres. Gorbachev and China's Pres. Zemin in the early '90s. Now, I say, this is the man to be photographed with. He is clearly proud of his young wife.
A photo of his Irish mother and his dad, "Big Jack," as a conductor on the Boston & Maine commuter line show a happy family.
After his twenty year tenure as CEO, it is his turn to choose his successor, Jeff Immelt, whose resemblance is so remarkable that they could be father and son. He is America's success story, I'd say even more than his idol, Warren Buffet. Now, after 41 years, no one says, "Jack who?" He had shown them who "Jack" is and had a ball along the way traveling here and yon, hobnobbing with important people everywhere he went. He is a man to be reckoned with -- hate to end a sentence with a preposition, but that's what he was. His mother would be proud of his success.
Rating:
Summary: Beat this
Review: Jack Welch, the man they call the Manager of the Century made General Electric a powerhouse. Not electrical power, however - his legacy is a global behemoth that reaches homes through their loans as much as their light fixtures. As a matter of fact, they could just take the "Electric" out of their name now and call themselves "General Corporation," as diversified as Jack made them. This diversification was the outcome of a single word that Jack himself created upon seeing Santa Clause show up while he was vacationing in the Carribean. The word was "boundarylessness." At a time when so many other companies were following the Tom Peters dictate, "Stick to your knitting," Jack was morphing GE into a free-form organizational titan by letting his people explore new business ideas, view their markets more broadly, and acquire several other businesses. The first phase of GE's success under Jack Welch did not, however, occur from boundaryless behavior. The hard work of stripping off poor performing businesses and individuals, and businesses that were a bad fit was first, along with Jack's demand for the remaining business lines to be either #1 or #2 in their respective industries. That foundation then enabled the profusion of successful companies that now carry the GE name.
Of course, these things did not all happen simply because of Jack's inventive vocabulary. The world's most admired CEO would probably rather be known as the "Businessman," rather than the "Manager of the Century." Management, to Jack, is about bureaucracy and maintaining the status quo - both abominations in his way of running a business. Jack, the businessman, succeeded mainly from his people focus and smart deal-making. In his twenty years as CEO of GE, and the twenty plus that he worked there to earn that assignment, Jack demonstrated a phenomenal adaptiveness and drive that encompassed a daunting range of business skills. Operating on gut instinct, as the title of his book implies, was his m.o., but take heart, all CEO wannabes. I've dissected the traits and activities Jack relates in his book, so that you can emulate them in your rising career. As for myself (if I ever decide I want to be a CEO when I grow up), after reading this book, I realize I have a long ways to go. I could claim the first eleven JW traits extracted here. How about you?
On his rise to the top, Jack was:
impatient
liked to analyze, numbers, does homework
thrived on competition
engineer in the beginning
working at headquarters (after many years in the field)
not afraid to walk from a deal
hardworking
frank: not superficially congenial
strategic thinker - with agility, situational awareness
educator/teacher
skilled with creating business charts
PhD
held after work celebrations
set strech goals
played golf
loved people, esp. passionate ones
bet on football
mentored
shared weekend corporate comraderie
took family vacations
played board and outdoor games w/family
grasped macroeconomics
entrepreneur
tenured
recruited talent
believed integrity fundamental to competitiveness
logistician - the services aspects of business
self-confident
thoroughly & continually appraised direct reports
outsourced back-office functions
Additionally, the house the Jack built was a result of these types of business acitivities that he conducted after becoming CEO:
Divestitures
Sharing Mental models
Informal shareholder mtgs
Quality of Work Life program
Balanced long and short-term corporate goals
layoffs - don't put them off
mergers & acquistions
business portfolio management
high finance savvy
union relations
evangelist
high roller (other CEOs, politicians)
compensation schemes
fresh (or borrowed) ideas encouraged
participating in projects of your choosing; setting up special projects
executive recruiting
appreciated E-business
fighting lawsuits
crisis management (willing to live with ambiguity)
long hours (but too busy to let that bother you)
understood Six Sigma - continuous improvement; statistical models
pushed globalization - international dealings, boundaryless
being The Advertising Manager
My honest self-appraisal tells me that there is a lot of room to grow yet. Thanks to Jack for telling us what he had to learn by gut instinct, so that we can pick it up quicker, and perhaps exceed him.
Rating:
Summary: A lot of reader patience required for a few good ideas.
Review: Any time you pick up a book with a title like "Jack: Straight from the Gut" you should know you are getting yourself into an exercise in self-congratulation. References to yourself by first name alone with a glib sub-title like "Straight from the Gut" are not good signs. For some reason I missed those signs in the title, but by the end of the book I understood it in spades.
Welch is an extremely talented leader and businessman, but only a few nuggets of his wisdom fall out of this doorstop of a book. The rest really comes across as Jack writing for Jack. It's also distracting to read books (like Lance Armstrong's "It's not about the Bike") in which the author praises their spouse as God's greatest gift to them when you, the reader, know that they've since been shown to be cheating on them or to have left them for someone flashier.
Better books out there on managment and business. Try "Good to Great;" it's a whole different format, but you'll get a lot more ideas on making yourself and your company better.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent "Mix" Biography and Business book
Review: Well, an excellent book with a lot of tips and tricks of how to turn an organization up-side-down and become great.
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