Rating: 
Summary: A must read for people aspiring to be leaders
Review: If I could give this book 6 stars, I would. If you work in Corporate America, this is a must read. I bought the books on tape (unabridged) and the emotion is even more powerful with Jack's own voice. Here is a guy who came from a poor background, used education to leverage himself into GE, but after that it was his vision, leadership and absolute intolerance for mediocrity that propelled him forward. If you work for a large company, this is an absolute must read! Its fascinating to hear the inner workings of this large ship that Welch turned around. Granted, he may appear a bit egoistic to people who don't understand his leadership style. For those of you who understand how business works in America will appreciate his successful this book. For those of you who don't, this will be an eye opener. Welch eventually sky rocketed GE's Market Capitalization and delivered to shareholders in a way that is often referred to in this modern era of corporate scandals as "the old fashioned way," yet his style was far from being old fashioned.He was ruthless to the old way of thinking. He moved mountains of bureaucracy within organizations. Did he do it all himself? Absolutely not. Thats not the role of a visionary and a true leader. He peered out of the proverbial tower and mobilized his forces, facing stiff resistance most of the time. What I particularly liked was his ability to see in people the ability to perform and lead. He has countless anecdotes of people who were not the typical "successor leader" drop them into leadership positions and have them shine. Welch quickly learned that good leaders aren't necessarily the ones that have multiple degrees from IVY leagues, but instead someone with the hunger and drive to succeed.
Welch had actually resigned from GE in his early days, but a great mentor held him back, and on the day of his farewell party he announced that he was going to stay. Just imagine what GE would have been without Jack!
Rating: 
Summary: Straight from a Voracious Gut
Review: This pedestrian account of a self-centered, self-worshiping CEO is worth perusing as a sort of curiosity. The true nature of the subject was revealed later, first as his marital peccadillos became known, and then as his wife revealed to the court, hence to the astonished public, the breathtaking cornucopia of luxuries he had bestowed upon himself through the help of Generous Electric's lapdog corporate directors. Full of cliches, this book could actually have been worse had it been written by the subject himself. Borrow this book, do not buy it.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting guy, this "Neutron Jack"
Review: This is really a very fascinating book, and I would have to say that it's required reading for management students. Welch started at GE in 1960 as a plastics engineer and made it to the CEO/Chairman position about twenty years later, which he then held for twenty years. This book summarizes his career and experiences at the company. There is no doubt that Welch helped turn GE into a true competitive juggernaut, poised for 21st C. success. There are dozens of great management lessons to be learned in these pages. It's a good read, and it's full of interesting stories and colorful characters. Of course, nasty "Neutron Jack" does make appearances. The guy insists that PCBs are safe. The guy wants to sue to make Superfund unconstitutional. And his notions of corporate social responsibility date back to the stone age. Of course, Jack's ego is bigger-than-life, and that comes through too. But for interested managers and management students and scholars, this book is worth the time.
Rating: 
Summary: A big boring brag
Review: I didn't finish this book. Donated it to the local public library...
Rating:
Summary: The Biography of GE
Review: While I enjoyed this book, there were some unexpected things about it that at various times almost turned me off to it. This isn't truly an autobiography of former GE CEO Jack Welch. This isn't really a true example of a business management training book. Its reads more like a 'parable' of GE, with Jack as the hero who battles the dragons of bureaucracy and inefficiency. Except for the fact that what transpired over the course of Jack Welch's time at GE is true, its almost an unbelievable story based on the delivery. What helped was that I was listing to an unabridged audio version, and hearing it read by Mike Barnacle was very entertaining. But since it did run 14 hours long, I probably wouldn't have kept up with the book if I would have had to actually read every word and absorbed the egocentric prose first hand. The 40 year saga of Jack & the Company as presented in this book gives a young business manager like me a case study in how to use innovation and constant improvement to further your career and grow a company of any size. But remember this is Jack Welch's story as told by Jack Welch. While he give the initial caveat of meaning 'we' when he says 'I,' it gets very hard to believe after a while that he truly means that. And a lot of the accomplishments of GE are the result of market conditions and a little bit of dumb luck. And it is made abundantly clear that isn't as good with personal relationships unless it involved some sort of business deal or golf--and most of the golf seems to be around business deals. Take what you can from this book, and if anything, enjoy it for its pure story value. Just keep in mind that even thought Jack might imply otherwise, his personality isn't quite large enough to overshadow GE.
Rating:
Summary: Life According to Jack
Review: ... Life According to Jack "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." For more book reviews visit: ...
Rating:
Summary: An unexpected disappointment
Review: Unfortunately I did not enjoy this book as much as I had anticipated. I bought it the day it was released. It took me a really long while to complete reading it. I was insulted by Welch's egomaniacal attitude. I always admired him as a leader and still have enormous respect for his clear and open mind. But this book was dominated by an ugly side to his character; extreme competitiveness. I can understand how it is relevant in the business world, but he obsessively applies everything in his life in the same way, with extreme competitiveness. If he provided those daily examples to reinforce his business principles, then fine, its a stylistic issue. If he is serious about his obsession with perfection with every breath he takes, around the clock, then I can definitively say to myself that Jack Welch is an abject failure. Life is not all about beating everyone around you. Not everything in life is a race. Not everything in life should revolve around your career, your company, your co-workers and your business. Even Welch admits (in an interview I saw for him, not this book) that his success was mainly due to circumstance. Yes, he was lucky; he was at the right place at the right time. No doubt he is brilliant, no doubt he is one of the hardest workers around. No doubt his honesty and integrity are what helped him get to the top. But there are millions of people with all his characteristics and more that get nowhere in life. This book does not recognize, let alone address those individuals. Why? because it is written (through the biographer) by an egomaniac that is so blinded by his brilliant success that all he sees in life is a mirror...
Rating:
Summary: Not the best...........
Review: I found Jack to be a little over powering. I was waiting for the leap tall buildings line. Not only did I find this book to be hard reading but I also think any company with respect for their employees and realistic objectives for their management teams thought this was logic, not a revelation.
Rating:
Summary: Skimming the surface of a great career
Review: This is not so much an autobiography as it is a summary of Jack Welch's amazing career at GE. His life prior to joining GE receives all of 1 chapter. After that is a description of his rise to the top and several of the major deals and initiatives that helped make his reputation as one of the great CEOs of the 20th century. Unfortunately, one book is insufficient to go into a meaningful level of detail and tell the stories of all these different events in a compelling way. Consider that whole books such as "Barbarians at the Gate" focus on individual similar acquisitions or initiatives to tell the story well. One chapter each for huge subjects like the attempted Honeywell acquistion just doesn't cut it. What you get is a brief outline of the events including the list of people who helped him move the initiative forward. He will then tell you what these people went on to accomplish in their careers. You won't care, though, because you never get to know these men in a meaningful way. They are just names. Almost every person in this book is two dimensional including Jack himself. I've followed Jack Welch's career in the pages of Business Week and other publications virtually his entire time as chairman of GE. I was expecting to learn about the man behind those stories. Instead, I read a rehash of those stories with very little additional detail. His family life and divorce are given almost no mention. Indeed, any difficult or defining moments on a purely personal level are few and far between here. I would only recommend this book if you know very little about Mr. Welch and are interested in his career and accomplishments. It is not a management textbook, nor is it much of a biography. It simply skims the surface of the career of perhaps the greatest CEO of the 20th century.
Rating:
Summary: Where's Dickens when we need him?
Review: As I read some of the excerpts from this book I must say I had to laugh out loud. Jack Welch is a character right out of Charles Dickens, out of _Hard Times_ in particular. This pompous ruthless fellow who gets the job done, and gets it done right-- you better believe it-- is a gigantic fountain of inspiration. Of course you may find him inspirational in the quest to be a better manager, to save the company, to get rich, to be a complete success. But I sure hope there are a few out there who are inspired to laugh heartily at the unintentional joke that is Jack Welch the Dickensian character. We live in times-- probably the same as all times-- when Jacks like these take themselves far too seriously, and are taken far too seriously in return. Everything is cut-throat, bottom-line: facts, facts, facts. We need goals, objectives; look here, we must define the problem. Oh I hope there are more than a few who find Jack Welch to be one of the great comic characters. Someone, please, prick this balloon with the needle of satire and deflate the many Jacks of this sad world.
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