Customer Reviews

The GE Way Fieldbook: Jack Welch's Battle Plan for Corporate Revolution

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"Jack Welch is arguably the most lauded CEO in the world...Such leading magazines as Time, Fortune, and Business Week all lavished praise upon him. They described him at times as the best CEO in America; at times, these magazines credited GE with being the best-run company in the nation...Welch built GE into the most successful American corporation of the late twentieth century by forging and then implementing a series of business strategies that have become his trademark: Business is simple. Don't make business overly complicated. Face reality. Don't be afraid of change. Fight bureaucracy. Get boundaryless. Use the brains of your workers. Find the best ideas, inside or outside your company, and then put those ideas into practice. These strategies and others have formed the building blocks of Jack Welch's battle for corporate revolution...The Welch strategies have been described in a number of popular business books...Most of these books describe the aforementioned business strategies, and others as well, and give an excellent overview of what Welch and GE have accomplished. What The GE Way Fieldbook sets out to accomplish is not simply to explain the strategies but to offer a blueprint of how other companies can implement those strategies expeditiously and seamlessly in their own business...In contrast with the other fieldbooks, The GE Way Fieldbook is the first of its kind to focus on the inner workings and business strategies of a specific company...While we include much of the GE story throughout the book, the primary objective is to provide a road map for those wishing to implement GE's practices in their own organizations. As a result, most chapters include not only textual material but also self-assessment exercises, action steps, and internal GE documents. It is worth noting that these documents, most of which have been provided by General Electric, have never appeared in book form" (pp.1-2).

In this context, Robert Slater divides his book into two main sections. But, in this review, I only focus on the first section as follows.

I. The GE Way: A Fieldbook for Corporate Revolution: In this section, he focuses on the different GE business strategies and initiatives within four learning modules.

1. The Leadership Module (Chapters 1-4): In this module, Slater explains:

* five characteristics of best quality leaders described by Jack Welch in 1997.

* key GE leadership ingredients-the four E:energy, energizer, edge, and execution-, and authentic leadership model of GE as refined views of Welch on leadership in 1999.

* advices of GE's successful executives to GE's senior and middle-level executives all around the world:

(1) Performance: Focus on current job performance...,

(2) Expertise: Become proficient in one business/technical area...,

(3) Ownership: Don't whine about your career...,

(4) Challenge and Visibility: Take the hard job...,

(5) Mentors/Supporters/Role Models: Broaden your base support...,

(6) Global Experience/Cultural Breadth: Expose yourself and family to different cultures early...,

* GE's assessment-360 degree feedback- and reward policy.

2. The Empowerment Module (Chapters 5-6): In this module, Slater explains:

* Welch's Work-Out model and six basic objectives of this model:

(1) reducing bureaucracy,

(2) improving organizational processes,

(3) empowering employees; reducing vertical boundaries,

(4) breaking down intra-organizational walls,

(5) developing formal alliances or informal relationships with customers,

(6) developing other extra-organizational relationships.

* how GE implements this Work-Out model.

3. The Organization Module (Chapters 7-10): In this module, by providing a series of questionnaires and other self-assessment exercises, Slater explains Welch's boundaryless organization strategy as the GE's emerging culture and the soul of GE's integrated diversity.

4. The Customer Module (Chapters 11-15): In this module, Slater presents a complete picture of GE's Six Sigma program, how it began, how it works, what impact it has had on the company, and what Jack Welch thinks about it. Welch argues that "Six Sigma is the most important management training thing we've ever had. It's better than going to Harvard Business School."

I highly recommend this invaluable guide.

This book captures the areas that are important to the businesses of GE and explains them well enough that a non-employee can understand. Being a past employee of GEIS, I found that the book explained the areas as they really are. No fluff. The book is easily set up as modules so there is no need to worry about reading one chapter to understand the next. Great Tool!

If you believe in Welch and want to understand how he made it happen then this is the book. No editorial prose. Basics and common sense suberbly executed.......

The text of this book could be reduced to 20% its original size if the author addressed the reader as a competent, intelligent manager. Instead, it's filled with cute pictures and 'how to's' I've heard the GE Way is good; don't opt for the Fieldbook.

This book is quite simply, horrible. I could overlook the fact that it assumes the reader just graduated first grade, if the ideas, methods and tools were any good. Reading this book, I have to believe GE got where it did in spite of Jack Welch, not because of him. These are not the concepts that revolutionize a business. The first great idea offered? An employee suggestion program. Wow, thanks. An entire book could be written on the futility of such efforts. Employees can't change the bad systems they are trapped in. Then we get the 4 E's. This is Jack Welch's idea that all managers in the organization must posess four ingredients: energy, be an energizer, edge, execution. Anyone familiar with Myers-Briggs, or True Colors personality type methodologies will see that Welch is basically saying he's after one personality type (I'll let you guess which one). This is nuts. The strive should be for diversity in personality types, especially on a leadership team. A good mix of idea people, action people, detail people, people who care about people, etc. And on that topic - caring about people, I hope the Jack Welch way doesn't become "the way". The ideas presented here about performance appraisals and forced distributions are not only stupid they are inhumane. I would refer you to the fine book "Abolishing Performance Appraisals" by Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins for a more enlightened view on people and performance.

The stuff about six sigma is not bad, although I'm not a big believer that you can problem-solve your way to excellence. It is possible to make entirely defect-free that which you should not be making at all.

In short, skip this book. The ideas are nothing new, and in many cases wrong, and the tools and illustrations are too simplistic to be of value.

I have read everything that has ever been written about the golden boy of corporate america - Jack Welch. He is a genious for our times and this book is just another example of his legendary managerial style. An easy read that is filled with key information to turn any company into an industry leader and any manager into a corporate leader. This book details everything a manager will ever need to know. A MUST BUY !!!!!!

Those who think Jack Welch is such a visionary should think again since in my opinion he cost the company billions. In the eighties I was involved in General Electric's GEnie which was the #3 online system online community with a very loyal customer base. AOL had not existed at the time. GEnie had a chance to dominate the online market because it had the knowledge and expertise at the time and a very loyal community. I remember one infamous meeting when I stood up and said basically "it's the Internet stupid." My comments went over like a lead balloon and basically the executives said ok any other questions and went on as if I had not made a statement at all. With just a few thousand dollars GEnie could have been one of the first to emphasize Internet access but GEnie was short-sighted with little or incorrect guidance from Jack Welch who supposedly was engaged in GEnie. With a very small capital infusion GEnie could have been the #1 online system. Where was Jack's six sigma? Make a long story short, GEnie never got real support from Jack just talk. The death knell for GEnie was when one infamous weekend the online resources were pulled to run some back office accounting program and thus denying online access to its GEnie customers. The customers weren't even informed why they couldn't access their email and never any apology. Where was Jack Welch? GEnie quietly faded away after that. Why haven't the hotshot investigated reporters reported this part of GE and Jack's history?