Jack Welch wasn't God, he was human. That's what made him even more remarkable
His lack of superhuman powers is what made Jack Welch all the more impressive
Jack Welch was a unique titan of industry and a loyal friend and a dedicated patriot. While I never worked for the legendary Jack Welch I did know him personally for 40 years.
I brought him to my MBA classes when I was at Harvard and taught with him at the GE Crotonville Training Center.
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I visited with him and shared many meals with over the decades. Without question, Welch was brilliant and catalytic – but human. Thus the deification by some is misleading as, like all of us, he had his flaws but the business world better because of contributions.
Why then should we not deify him? It is because his lack of superhuman powers is what makes him all the more impressive.
Born in Salem, Mass., the son of a train conductor going up and back the same route, Welch was on a track to greatness.
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Despite being short with a bad stammer, he still never felt less confident when he worked alongside his patrician stately colleagues with fancy pedigrees.
A pugnacious champion of the meritocracy, Welch insisted everyone call him “Jack.” He battled against rigid structures and mediocrity.
Welch always encouraged workers to speak candidly without fear of reprisals for bad news or challenging perspectives.
He once considered leaving, early in his career. He did not stand on rigid traditions of any sort –He strived for all his businesses to be either No. 1 or No. 2 in their industries.
General Electric, under his revered predecessor Reginald Jones actually lost 21 percent market value. Welch reversed that.
He prevented GE from experiencing the decline of other industrial titans who stumbled such as: Westinghouse, US Steel, Woolworths, Litton Industries.
Welch was always curious, asking questions with a rare facility to vacillate between macro strategic and micro operational levels of analysis.
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The GE he inherited was worth $14 billion. Twenty years later it was worth $400 billion. However, despite the Jack Welch zealotry which abounds, he was not the leading performer of his generation.
His greatest legacy was his leadership development commitment. Welch was not a snob and would talk with anyone – to learn something new or discover rising talent. His renowned Series C meetings every 90 days were very tough periodic talent reviews which he cared about almost as much as business unit performance.
He taught many GE Crotonville management classes himself. His progenies included: Jeff Immelt of GE; Bob Nardelli of Chryslers; Jim McNerney of Boeing; Dave Cote of Honeywell, Jeff Zucker of CNN, Davis Zaslav of Discovery. He was all business. He was blunt and direct, ruthlessly competitive but had no tolerance for bigotry.
He demonstrated the need for CEOs to focus on shareholder value, reinvigorating a hidebound bureaucracy for a new era, and to develop new leaders as a top priority.
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He is properly renowned throughout the global business world, for good and not-so-good, as an iconic image of U.S. business leadership. But also, like Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs, he was just as effective in his unrelenting self-promotion.
Journalists and academics were all familiar with his careful reading and correction of their reports on his performance and he brought many academics into GE.
American society loves to elevate leaders to mythic levels and then to attack them for their flaws. Like other leaders in business, government, academia and even the church, Jack Welch was not a god nor did he create the lasting technologies of the past century which reshaped our lives like Jobs, Gates or Edison.
He was a historically great business builder, a fresh thinker, a genuine patriot, and an honorable man. No one who ever worked with Welch forgets the experience and all look to their shared time with him as a badge of honor.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld served as full tenured professor at Emory's Goizueta Business School for a decade and a professor at the Harvard Business School for a decade, and is currently the senior associate dean of leadership programs as well as the Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management for the Yale School of Management, as well as founder and president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute focused on CEO leadership and corporate governance.