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Learn why GE has always had the best inventors, the best strategic planners, and the best results
William Rothschild, who witnessed GE’s revolution firsthand, explains the five keys that made GE a global phenomenon—and gives managers a complete toolkit for duplicating its remarkable success. He explains the GE Code—the hallmark of all GE leadership teams—and provides a far-ranging prescriptive plan for strategizing the GE way.
Apply the Successful Management Strategies of the World's Most Competitive Company to Your Organization
For over 125 years, GE has been a managerial, technological, and financial leader, continually outperforming the competition and boasting one of the most valued stocks in the world.
Now, in The Secret to GE's Success, Bill Rothschild, former GE Senior Strategist, draws out the key management lessons from GE's entire history to show leaders everywhere how they can achieve GE-like success in their own organizations.
This compelling strategic leadership book looks at the four stages of GE's development_the eras of Thomas Edison, Ralph Cordiner, Jack Welch, and Jeff Immelt_and explains how the successes and failures of each period contributed to making GE a world-class company.
Rothschild analyzes in detail the five factors that have been the hallmarks of all GE leadership teams throughout its history:
Filled with fascinating “behind-the-scenes” accounts of GE's best strategic decisions, The Secrets to GE's Success features a wealth of practical, hands-on concepts that leaders can successfully apply to any company.
The Secret to GE's Success is the first book to identify and explain every aspect of the GE Code: the hallmark of all GE leadership teams. Bill Rothschild, former GE Senior Strategist and 30-year insider, describes GE's success over its entire history, focusing on the crucial role of leadership in the company's evolution, and drawing on the timeless lessons of GE practice throughout its storied past.
This essential leadership guide offers an in-depth look at the four stages of GE's development, ranging from the company's founding by Thomas Edison, through the eras of Ralph Cordiner and Jack Welch, to the present period under Jeff Immelt. At each stage, the author highlights the strong leadership characteristics and highly effective strategies that produced consistent growth and profitability.
Designed to boost management skills and career potential, The Secret to GE's Success explores the five key reasons for the company's astonishing, long-term achievements, showing managers how and when to:A complete toolkit for duplicating GE's remarkable achievements, The Secret to GE's Success now equips leaders at any company, anywhere in the world, with a far-ranging prescriptive plan for strategizing the GE way_ and dramatically improving organizational performance.
About the Author
William E. Rothschild
was Senior Corporate Strategist at GE, responsible for business development, competitive strategies, and GE's first market-based Corporate Strategic Plan. For the past 22 years, he has run his own consulting firm, Rothschild Strategies Unlimited, LLC, serving clients such as BellSouth, Avon, Perkin-Elmer, Pitney Bowes, General Public Utilities, Clark-Hurth, Advance Machine, Equitable, Gerber Technologies, CSX, JC Penney, and many others worldwide. Mr. Rothschild is the author of four previous books, including How to Gain (and Maintain) the Competitive Advantage (McGraw-Hill) as well as many articles. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting in parts, but hard to apply (3.25 stars),
By
This review is from: The Secret to GE's Success: A Former insider Reveals the Leadership lessons of the World's Most Competitive Company (Hardcover)
First, a disclaimer: unlike most (all?) of the previous reviewers, I'm not a GE alumnus. So I can't opine as to how intense will be the waves of nostalgia this book may induce in you if you currently work or previously worked for that company.For outsiders, this book describes some interesting history. But I was disappointed at the relative shallowness of the discussion. The book seems designed to be read during a flight from L.A. to Chicago; the author duly adheres to commandment #1 of contemporary business book writing, namely don't trust your reader to be able to concentrate on one topic without interruption for more than 1.25 pages. (It also doesn't add depth that he relies on websites for most of his references.) Compared to, say, Robert Burgelman's study of Intel, "Strategy is Destiny", this book is very unsatisfying if you're interested in strategy. Considering that the author had been a senior corporate strategist at GE, one could reasonably have hoped for more. Instead, the lion's share of the discussion is about the personalities and decisions of GE's leadership, and issues of succession. Even strategic issues are refracted through this leadership lens. Not that this was uninteresting -- but unless you're a CEO or a board member of a company, you aren't going to be able to apply these lessons on the job. The author's decision to structure the book chronologically rather than, say, thematically, constrained him to draw edifying strategic conclusions from each of GE's administrations, even when the performance of some of them had been less than exemplary. As a result, some of the "takeaways" can be a bit banal, such as "Review your strategy from the top to the bottom and make sure it is internally consistent" (@ 69). Sometimes the advice seems inappropriately retro or unsubtle, e.g. using Edison's experience to justify patenting everything and litigating aggressively (@ 17). This ignores other possible ways of getting value from IP portfolios, as well as the fact that managing the costs of filing, litigating and maintaining multinational patent portfolios is a much bigger headache today than in Edison's time. The author tells us to judge business practices by the standards of their day, rather than the present; OK. But whether those historical practices can tell us much useful for the present has to be judged by the standards of today. And those standards include globalization, antitrust regulation in the US and EU, hair-trigger financial markets, and many other factors that have changed radically during GE's 126-year history. Nonetheless, the most interesting aspect of the book for me was the discussion of GE's management team from 1922 until the early years of the Second World War, especially CEO Gerard Swope (who served about as long as Jack Welch). As amazing as it sounds, Swope was a Socialist. When the Depression hit, he and chairman Owen Young instituted a variety of progressive benefits policies, including offering all employees a 4-day work-week (to avoid having to fire 20% of the workforce) and profit-sharing. They also invited the CIO to unionize the company, which allowed GE to avoid strikes until the late 1940s (under Swope's successor). As an adviser to FDR, Swope became the prime architect of Social Security, among other New Deal programs. At the same time, Swope and Young also instituted a number of very smart, very capitalist moves that enabled the company to grow under the so-called "Benign Cycle" based on GE's consumer products and power generation systems product lines. To think that there were such complex and idealistic business leaders in the past -- now, *that* made me feel nostalgic.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Layman's View,
By
This review is from: The Secret to GE's Success: A Former insider Reveals the Leadership lessons of the World's Most Competitive Company (Hardcover)
William E. Rothschild's book The Secret to GE's Success is a very good read.... even for laypeople like myself who are not versed in management strategies. It captures your interest and holds it from beginning to end.The book gives an illuminating history of the company from its inception 126 years ago and its' emphasis on leadership and strategic planning for the future, as well as how each CEO paved the way for his successor. Little did Thomas Edison realize what he started in the late 1870's. General Electric has always had a vested interest in its employees .... a rarity in the current big business climate. Rothschild notes that GE's motto: "Do right voluntarily" extends to its employees and business practices today.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
LATIN: The Critically Important Acronym,
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This review is from: The Secret to GE's Success: A Former insider Reveals the Leadership lessons of the World's Most Competitive Company (Hardcover)
No doubt for reasons of convenience, most (if not all) of the most important information about GE is summarized within a series of acronyms. For example, with regard to GE's "4 E's (+P) of Leadership," Jack Welch explained that the four Es represent positive Energy, the ability to Energize others, having an Edge (i.e. the courage to make tough yes-or-no decisions) and Execution (the ability to get the job done). What about P? "Passion!"The subtitle to William E. Rothschild'sbrilliant book refers to another acronym, LATIN, that reveals "the secret to GE's success": Leadership as well as Adaptability, Talent, Influence, and Networks. As Rothschild explains, his material covers GE's successes and failures since 1892 when it was established in New York, the result of a merger of of the Thomson-Houston Company and the Edison General Electric Comany. Charkes Coffin was GE's first president and Edison, who left the company two years later, initially served as a director. Rothschild describes the five success factors in each stage and provides "an objective assessment of what was done in each realm - both positive and negative."The material is carefully organized within four sections, each of which covers a specific period throughout GE's history: Part I "Living Better Electrically": 1879-1939 (Chapters 1-4) Part II "Diversification and Decentralization": 1940-1970 (Chapters 5-9) Part III "Portfolio Leadership": 1971-2001 (Chapters 10-13) Part IV: "Back to the Future": 2001-Present (Chapters 14-16) When reading Rothschild's book, it soon becomes obvious that those who led GE determined its priorities and objectives in each of the stages of its development. For example, Edison's focus was on identifying real problems, finding solutions and commercial applications for them, insisting that everything be patented and copyrighted; Coffin and Edwin Rice (1892-1921) ensured the success of the merger with a commitment to participative and consultative leadership, and willingly shared authority with associates; Gerard Swope and then Owen Young (1922-1939) took that commitment "to a higher level by creating ways for managers and employees to contribute to the company's strategies and policies; Charles Wilson and Philip Reed (1940-1950) were transitional leaders and Wilson "understood the old GE perfectly" but lacked the experience and the temperament to lead "the significantly charged company" after World War Two and voluntarily stepped won; Ralph Cordiner and Reed (1950-1963) spearheaded GE's decentralized growth with "a new and relatively unproven way," management by objectives (MBO); Fred Borch (1963-1972) continued decentralized management and, when realizing that he hadattempted to do too much ("GE can do anything it wants to."), "instituted a radical change in GE, enabling it for the first time to exit or prune products or even entire businesses"; lacking a co-leader following the premature death of his mentor, "Flip" Philippe, Reginald Jones(1972-1981) created a new "chairman's office," assumed the titles of chairman and CEO, and surrounded himself with those who had diverse personalities andf leadership styles; Jack Welch (1981-2001) accepted Jones's suggestion that he "blow up GE" (i.e. eliminate everyone and everything that did not add substantial value to the company) and did so - in Rothschild's words -- as a "contentious, demanding, celebrity CEO, a surgeon leader," [who was his]own inteligence network"; and finally, Jeff Immelt (2001-Present) who is more diplomatic "but still tough" and considers people selection and their development especially high priorities as he leads GE through what continues to be a troubled global economy. By the way, those who have a special interest in GE's current CEO are urged to check out David Magee's recently published book, Jeff Immelt asnf the New GE Way. Rothschild devotes equal attention to each of the other four success factors (i.e. Adaptability, Talent, Influence, and Networks) during each of the four eras. Readers will also appreciate his skillful use of various devices that cluster key points. Briefly annotated checklists, for example, such as these: Common characteristics of all GE training programs (Pages 32 and 112), special benefits offered to electric utilities companies to ensure their growth and profitability (Page 92), GE's four-step process to recognize business opportunities (Pages 176-177), the steps Welch took to implement Six Sigma at GE (Page 214), how various CEOs successfully completed major change initiatives (Page 265), and finally, "some GE surprises and what the company did in response" (Pages 269-270). Other reader-friendly devices include boxed "Exhibits" that also cluster key points such as those that summarize the five ingreients for success for each of the four eras: "Living Better Electrically" (Edison through Swope and Young), Diversification and Decentralization (Wilson...Borch), Portfolio Leadership (Borch...Welch), and "Back to the Future" Strategy (Immelt). Rothschild also provides a "Highlights" section to introduce each of the four Parts and a "Takeaways" section at the conclusion of most chapters. When concluding his book, William Rothschild acknowledges, "The GE Way doesn't always work consistently at GE; it can't possibly work for any other comany that attempts to embrace it indiscriminantly." Rather, he urges those in other companies to "adapt, rather than adopt, the GE approach" that he so brilliantly examines in this book.
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