If you judge books by their covers, Jack Welch's Winning
certainly grabs your attention. Testimonials on the back come
from none other than Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rudy Giuliani,
and Tom Brokaw, and other praise comes from Fortune, Business
Week, and Financial Times. As the legendary retired CEO of
General Electric, Welch has won many friends and admirers in high
places. In this latest book, he strives to show why. Winning
describes the management wisdom that Welch built up through four
and a half decades of work at GE, as he transformed the
industrial giant from a sleepy "Old Economy" company with a
market capitalization of $4 billion to a dynamic new one worth
nearly half a trillion dollars.
Welch's first book, Jack: Straight from the Gut, was structured
more as a conventional CEO memoir, with stories of early career
adventures, deals won and lost, boardroom encounters, and Welch's
process and philosophy that helped propel his success as a
manager. In Winning, Welch focuses on his actual management
techniques. He starts with an overview of cultural values such as
candor, differentiation among employees, and inclusion of all
voices in decision-making. In the second section he covers issues
around one's own company or organization: the importance of
hiring, firing, the people management in between, and a few other
juicy topics like crisis management. From there, Welch moves into
a discussion of competition, and the external factors that can
influence a company's success: strategy, budgeting, and mergers
and acquisitions. Welch takes a more personal turn later with a
focus on individual career issues--how to find the right job, get
promoted, and deal with a bad boss--and then a final section on
what he calls "Tying Up Loose Ends." Those interested in the
human side of great leaders will find this last section
especially appealing. In it, Welch answers the most interesting
questions that he's received in the last several years while
traveling the globe addressing audiences of executives and
business-school students. Perhaps the funniest question in this
section comes at the very end, posed originally by a businessman
in Frankfurt, who queried Welch on whether he thought he'd go to
heaven (we won't give away the ending).
While different from the steadier stream of war stories and
real-life examples of Welch's first book, Winning is a very
worthwhile addition to any management bookshelf. It's not often
that a CEO described as the century's best retires, and then
chooses to expound on such a wide range of management topics.
Also, aside from the commentary on always-relevant issues like
employee performance reviews and quality control, Welch suffuses
this book with his pugnacious spirit. The Massachusetts native
who fought his way to the top of the world's most valuable
company was in many ways the embodiment of "Winning," and this
spirit alone will provide readers an enjoyable read. --Peter Han
