Jack Welch (Business Masterminds) [Hardcover]

Robert Heller (Author), Adele Hayward (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Business Masterminds | Publication Date: March 5, 2001

CEO of General Electric for 30 years, Jack Welsh was declared the greatest manager of the 20th century. Focusing firmly on results, he revolutionized management to achieve phenomenal growth for his company. In this inspiring volume, Robert Heller analyzes Jack Welsh's core management strategies and presents a series of masterclasses that show how to put the business guru's theories into practice. Discover how Welsh: eliminates bureaucracy and breaks down boundaries, mobilizes and motivates his workforce, exploits and embraces change, establishes a new company culture, and sets stretch targets for himself and others. Supplying lessons from today's most celebrated and successful business thinkers, the Business Masterminds series is perfect for people hoping to advance their careers, make their own businesses grow and prosper, or achieve personal goals. In addition to providing overviews of each leader's most influential writings and speeches, each title is packed with full-color charts, diagrams, and photographs that graphically illustrate complex concepts.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The graphically arresting format of Business Masterminds makes even difficult concepts approachable. Heller's text is surprisingly astute. (Publishers Weekly)

About the Author

Robert Heller is himself a prolific author of management books. The first, The Naked Manager, published in 1972, established Heller as an iconoclastic, wide-ranging guide to managerial excellence -- and incompetence. Heller has drawn on the extensive knowledge of managers and management that he acquired as the founding editor of Management Today, Britain's premier business magazine, which he headed for 25 years. Books such as The Supermanagers and In Search of European Excellence address the ways in which the latest ideas on change, quality, and motivation are providing new routes to business success. In 1990 Heller wrote Culture Shock, one of the first books to describe how IT would revolutionize management. Since then, as writer, lecturer, and consultant, Heller has continued to tell managers how to "Ride the Revolution," the title of his 2000 book, written with Paul Spenley. His books for Dorling Kindersley's Essential Managers series are international bestsellers.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: DK ADULT (March 5, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789471590
• ISBN-13: 978-0789471598
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,614,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well-Integrated Overview of Jack Welch's Philosophy for GE, May 6, 2001

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Jack Welch (Business Masterminds) (Hardcover)

Most articles and books about Mr. Welch overly segment his thinking. As a result, you miss the core for the details. Mr. Heller has overcome this problem, and puts the individual elements of what GE has done under Mr. Welch into a useful perspective. The book also contains helpful exercises for applying these concepts to your business.

Mr. Welch is a master of focus. He took GE and turned its attention to the most significant opportunities. This was accomplished both by drawing attention to certain areas, and by eliminating many others.

Mr. Welch's great strength is that he is open to and hungry for new ideas. As a result, his thinking has improved a lot from the beginning of his tenure as CEO. A modest weakness of this book is that it doesn't say enough about how the later ideas sometimes contradict the earlier ideas. For example, the book shows that Mr. Welch was always focused on cost-cutting. In the beginning, he often did this in the most brutal way . . . with massive layoffs. Only very late in the game did he discover the quality processes that produce larger and more valuable cost reductions. Such quality processes flourish when employees have stable employment and the focus is on improving their knowledge and autonomy. Yet, the concepts of Six Sigma were well known early in his tenure as CEO. Perhaps GE needed to been even more eager for new ideas than it has been. On the other hand, GE seems to have been effective in adapting to the Internet in a timely way.

The book is organized around the following principles:

(1) Turning managers into leaders

(2) Using everyone's thinking in the enterprise

(3) Moving ahead faster than competitors in meaningful ways

(4) Expanding stock price more rapidly than earnings

(5) Using new trends the influences to your advantage.

These concepts are then translated into practices for you to use in three master classes:

(1) Exercising leadership

(2) Changing company culture

(3) Breaking boundaries and limitations.

This book will be most useful to companies and leaders that are in many businesses, have a lot of bureaucracy and rigidity, and are not in high growth areas. The examples are almost all drawn in ways that are relevant to those problems. On the other hand, the idea of focusing is useful for any business.

My main disappointment in the book is that it did not address GE Capital, which has been the source of most of GE's success under Mr. Welch.

Mr. Heller draws extensively on the primary books about Mr. Welch that preceded this one. Unless you want a lot more detail, you will not need to read those. There is a bibliography to help you find them in case you decide you do want to read them.

After you examine this situation, I suggest that you take Mr. Welch's observation seriously that he did not move fast enough. If your company is going to be operating as well as it possibly can in five years, what changes have to be made before then? How can you get through these needed changes in the fastest, smoothest way? The future environment will probably not allow you to take as long to change as Mr. Welch had.

Focus on the places where leadership can make the most difference!

4.0 out of 5 stars A good overview, May 3, 2001

By 

Helcio (Curitiba, Paraná Brazil) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jack Welch (Business Masterminds) (Hardcover)

This book presents a good overview of Jack Welch's way of thinking. It must be read as an "overview" as we are talking about a 20 years management history in 90 pages. The summaries (Masterclasses) at the end of some chapters are very good and help to fix Mr. Welch's ideas and how to use then in our daily work. The bibliography presented at the end of the book should be used if one wants to go deeper in some points presented slightly in the book.