Jack Welch: The man who led from the front




The news of sad demise of John Francis ‘Jack’ Welch is like a bolt from the blue to millions of his admirers and followers of his unique management thoughts, ideas and practices.  To have held the steering wheel of General Electric for 20 long years from 1981 to 2001 and delivered breakthrough results is a matter of life time lessons for management students and practitioners alike.  It is no exaggeration to say that Jack Welch will be part of our minds, souls and psyche for all time to come. He wrote great books himself including the best seller ‘Straight from the Guts’. As immortal John Keats once said ‘A thing of beauty is joy for ever’, Jack Welch’s persona and philosophy would continue to enthrall and enthuse us ever after.  As a management teacher and leadership trainer, I was fortunate to come across a beautiful PPT on ‘25 Leadership Lessons’. These 25 lessons are a must for every student under the Sun pursuing   PGDM and MBA courses.  Right at Nitte School of Management, Bengaluru, I have presented this PPT on Jack Welch to every PGDM batch year after year and it never failed to feed the young management minds even once. A quick look at the enormous literature on this great soul is as under:
  • He nourished a team of about 750 top management professionals and helped them to move out in different directions in pursuit of dreams.
  • He never compromised with under/non-performers.  Perhaps this ‘ruthlessness’ enabled him to reward the performers with bounties.
  • He often declared that leaders at the top must let others know where they stand in terms of performance and tangible results.  If not, such leaders (?) can be considered to be ‘cowards’.
  • He emphasized on building trust. Leaders can do so only by being transparent.
  • Jack Welch focused on creating management teams and individuals. Perhaps this one single action/intervention helped him turn GE into a largest market cap company in 1999.  
  • His relentless search for ‘dead woods’ among employees and winnow them out, must have enabled him to make the organization/management structure flat. He kept up this trend throughout the organizational tiers.
  • He worked on three dimensions seamlessly namely customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and cash flow. Perhaps these three factors alone can bail out any organization from ills of non performance, negative image in the eyes of stake holders and liquidity crunch.
    By, Dr. N J Shetty, M.Com, MBA, MA (Psy), LLB, PG. DHRM, PG. DMM, D. TD, CAIIB, Pragya, Ph.D. Professor & HOD, NITTE School of Management, Bengaluru.



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