Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will: Revised Edition

Rating:
Summary: An educational, yet entertaining, read
Review: I came into this book assuming a book on the history of Jack Welch's early years with GE. It ended up being much more and I was pleasantly surprised at the overall educational value of the book.

The book is broken down into three "acts" which recount the years of Jack Welch - when and how he was made the CEO with GE, the early years of layoffs, the early resistance to his ideas, reorganization of GE, the need for globalization, and eventual acceptance of his ideas as he empowered GE's employees. Welch's ideas of empowering the employee encompassed such things as "boundarylessness", strong values, leadership, simplicity, and productivity. As the book progresses, the reader is provided with the real world GE examples that qualified Jack's ideas and their results. Nor does the book hold back from describing Jack's missteps and describes the lessons learned.

Overall the book was a good read. The examples read as stories that both entertain and educate. Welch's ideas, as presented in Control Your Destiny, are probably now considered common sense business practices. The ideas seem simple today, yet were revolutionary for that time as you'll read.

The end of the book provides a manual that can be used to carry out a similar revolution with your business and employees. I didn't really work my way through it - it seemed more appropriate for larger organizations.

Rating:
Summary: Road to mastering destiny
Review: Jack Welch, the revolutioanry CEO of GE shows his business acumen in mastering change. A must-read for today's business managers ... a practical guide to business transformation amidst modern competition and changing business processes. Articulately crafted by the duo Tichy and Shermon, the philosophy of Jack Welch reminds me of Deming's Cycle (Plan, Do, Check and Act). The GE case study will find similarities in the modern industrial scenario - where managing change is the most challenging job. The approach of Welch towards modern management is based on both pragmatism and gut-feeling. He tried to explore a semblance of harmony amidst chaos, often pushing his executives to express themselves freely without contraints, and transformed threats into opportunities, thus bringing the GE juggernaut from the brink of collapse to remarkable recovery.

Rating:
Summary: Changing the modus operandi of a modern US corporation
Review: This book encapsulates how Jack Welch has changed the modus operandi of a modern U.S. corporation. His principles of number-one-or-number-two, integrated diversity, boundarylessness, and speed, simplicity, and self-confidence have become a part of everyday life at General Electric. The basis of these principles -- what drives these principles -- is Welch's view of a strong business, which "...must consistently grow both revenues and profits: increasing revenues through a constant stream of new ideas and product innovations and increasing profits through unceasing improvements in productivity."

Although Welch's view of a successful business may not be new, the techniques and operating procedures employed to attain these characteristics are vastly different than previous practices at GE. This is another way of saying that the modus operandi, or method of operating, at GE has been changed by Jack Welch. This change is summed up nicely by a statement in the book: "This is the story of how General Electric got through the wall, from one man exhorting his subordinates to a team of hundreds of thousands of people working together."

Rating:
Summary: Decent read, lessons to be learned.
Review: This book looks dauntingly thick when you pick it up, but some brief exploration will show that including the interviews only 311 pages are the Jack Welch story-- the rest of the book is Afterword, GE Timeline, GE Shareholder Reports, Bibliography and finally a section meant to be applied to your own business. I suppose that there are readers out there who wanted that level of completeness in their history of GE. I didn't. I stopped reading after the afterword.

The book covers GE during the period of Jack Welch's reign. Specifically, it charts his efforts in five major initiatives: Services, Six Sigma, Digitization, Succession, and the Honeywell acquisition.

I found it interesting and readable, although I was left with the feeling (despite the author's best efforts) that these were very difficult achievements to duplicate if you weren't Jack Welch. Although ostensibly a business biography, I still had much more of a feel of personality than facts when I was done. I would have been pleased to have a less broad-ranging treatment which delved a little bit more deeply into some specific numbers and consequences. Although this information might have been contained in the investor reports, I didn't have the patience to page through it and find the information.