Product Description
Behind the scenes with the legendary CEO Jack Welch's innovative leadership strategies revived a lagging GE, transforming it into a powerhouse with a staggering $300 billion-plus market capitalization. In writing Jack Welch and the GE Way, author Robert Slater was given unprecedented access to Welch and other prominent GE insiders. What emerged is a brilliant portrait that tells you what makes Jack Welch tick. Learn how to work the Welch magic on your own company as you find out how he dismantled the boundaries between management layers, between engineers and marketers, between GE and its customers to streamline the process of getting products and services to market.
Get details on Welch's far-reaching Six Sigma quality initiative, and discover how its principles and standards can save billions of dollars...how and why he has made GE a truly global company (and why you must think global as well)...and all the other Welch "midas touch" strategies you can put to work in your organization, at every level!
Amazon.com Review
A recent Fortune poll cited General Electric Company as America's most admired company. Much of the credit went to Jack Welch, GE's chief executive for the past 17 years. During his tenure, GE's revenues and profits have grown enormously. Its share price has soared, making GE the world's most valuable company. And the key to GE's success, according to Jack Welch and the GE Way, is Welch's fanatical devotion to a personal philosophy of leadership. Author Robert Slater has made a growth industry of his own out of Welch, penning two previous books on him, The New GE in 1992 and Get Better or Get Beaten! two years later. The same territory was plowed in 1993 by Noel M. Tichy and Stratford Sherman in Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will.
In this book, Slater draws extensively on Welch's own words to deliver his now familiar message: keep it simple; face reality; embrace change; fight bureaucracy. Bromides these may be, but Slater's account of Welch's fierce efforts to lead a global, multifarious organization of 270,000 people does inspire admiration, even if it does not enable emulation. The book provides fresh insights into GE's shift toward service businesses, as with its takeover and transformation of NBC. Most timely are Welch's closing thoughts on trends in the global economy. Jack Welch and the GE Way is a must for the legions of "Welch-heads" out there and for anyone else interested in this brilliant leader's perspective on the future of business. --Barry Mitzman
Average Customer Review:
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A Good Book But I Prefer Jack's Own, 2005-12-24
I bought this book before reading Jack's "Straight from the Gut". When I read this book I thought it was 5 stars and I re-read this book at least once looking for clues to help my own business. Then I read Jack's book and realized his was better. In any case this covers all the basic aspects of Jack's methods including the educational meetings at the GE "university", cleaning house, picking winning companies, eliminating small market share companies, and promoting top performers and eliminating underperformers. It shows how he is hands on.
Good if you want to read two books on Jack Welch.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Disappointing, 2005-06-07
When I read a book I expect to learn something I don't already know or at least revisit something I already know from a new perspective or explain it in a uniquely articulate way. This book fails on all three measures. Walsh shares no secret insights -- he only discusses his introduction of a number of standard business practices to GE. This include 6-Sigma, downsizing, A-B-C rating of managers, etc. -- The usual mix of management science, art and business fad typical in pop management books. And even the discussions of how these management tools were implemented at GE is filled with extrainious details about the meetings at which these policies were introduced and other non-value added story telling. This only leads me to believe that it was added as filler to get the page count up to the size required for a book.
For all of Jack Welsh's insistence that his business units be 1st or 2nd in a market it is pure hypocrisy for him to be publishing this book. Your time and money is better spent reading Peter Drucker.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Author Paid By The Word, 2004-04-06
Good overview of the Jack Welch way, including a variety of innovative business ideas that brought GE forward.However, as a book goes, it would appear the author was paid by the word. Each of the "secrets" is presented, reviewed, repeated, and presented again in a 300+ page book that would better be summarized in about 20. I kept reading after the first two chapters thinking I would learn somthing new, but honestly, save your money, read chapter one at the library, and go home with just as much insight.
To the publisher, I'd recommed an "executive summary" version for the next edition.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Obsolete, 2003-02-20
This book has some nuggets but you do have to overcome some meandering. The author jumps from format to format sometimes turning the book into a Jack Welch biography and at other times acting as if the book were a serious business analysis of GE and the changes Welch brought. It fails as a biography and the business analysis is lightweight at best. It's not clear what this book is trying to deliver but what I got out of it were a cursory understanding of the challenges that GE faced and some sense of why Jack Welch succeeded. Now that Jack Welch is retired and has an autobiography "Straight from the Gut" this book is almost obsolete.
5 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
Fools Gold, 2002-03-22
Applying some of the concepts of Mr. Welch's philosophy helped to facilitate operational improvement in my team that earned a distinguished company award. I was so enthralled that I purchased a GE fridge, and convinced my in-laws to do the same even though another brand of fridge lasted tham almost 30 years. Less than 5 years and thousands of dollars later, neither GE fridge is operational. The GE Way -- admire the brilliance, but stay away from the products.