Customer Reviews

The GE Work-Out : How to Implement GE's Revolutionary Method for Busting Bureaucracy & Attacking Organizational Proble

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I completely agree with the reader who said that this book could have been written much more effectively. It is nearly 400 pages and should have been no more than 25 to 50. Most issues or thoughts in this book while being solid are explained in far far too painful of detail with a great deal of redundancy. This made reading the book extremely wasteful of my time.

Perhaps the authors should have a "Work Out" on improvement of their materials.

'Work-Out' is the famous organizational process that General Electric, the greatest industrial firm in the world, used to bust bureaucracy - fast.

At its core, Work-Out is a simple, straightforward concept for cutting out bureaucracy and solving organizational problems - fast. Large groups of employees and managers - from different levels and functions of the organization - come together to address issues that they identify or that senior management has raised as concerns. In small teams, people challenge prevailing assumptions about "the way we've always done things" and come up with recommendations for dramatic improvements in organizational processes. The Work-Out teams present their recommendations to a senior manager in a "town meeting", where the manager engages the entire group in a dialogue about the recommendations and then makes yes-or-no decisions on the spot. Recommendations for changing the organization are assigned to "owners" who have volunteered to carry them out and follow through to get results. That's Work-Out in a nutshell.

Work-Out can be applied to almost any type of problem. It was first used at GE to harvest the low-hanging fruit of OVERGROWN BUREAUCRACY by getting unnecessary and unproductive work out of the organizational system - e.g. reduce meetings, reports, and approval levels. They asked what procedures didn't make sense? Where were they wasting time? What activities seemed to add little value? Some of the bureaucratic procedures were expense reimbursements, making travel arrangements, obtaining office supplies, updating personnel data, taking education courses, upgrading software, and more. But also in the core functions, bureaucracy was found: filling out forms for deals, preparing presentations for approval meetings, keeping track of customer data, obtaining approval for materials purchasing, overwhelming amounts of extra analysis to justify various investments or initiatives. Some of the results were e.g. that expense accounts did not need multiple approvals, people could purchase approved software without going through the IT department, and a pre-deal process was established to see if deals were worth pursuing before going through all the analytics.

Work-Out has been successfully adapted to any type of organization - public or private, commercial or non-profit, large or small. In all of these organizations, no matter what the issue, the process remains much the same.

1. Bring together the people from the organization who know the issues best
2. Challenge them to develop creative solutions
3. Decide on the solutions immediately in a public forum
4. Empower people to carry them out

Despite its massive impact on GE and other firms, Work-Out is not a snake oil or magic elixir. It is a simple set of concepts, tools, and experiences. When stripped to its essence, Work-Out allows people to get some obstacles out of the way so they can do their work better. In many firms, that alone would be a significant gain.

The real merit of this book is the practical approach. If you are - as I am - struggling with the challenges of continually keeping our organizations lean, then this book can help you. It contains many inspiring worksheets, action plans, tools, and hands-on case studies.

The authors of this book helped GE create Work-Out. So don't expect theoretical contributions. Only sound advice.

Co-author Dave Ulrich is one of my favourite HR experts. I can recommend many of his books, e.g. `Results-Based Leadership' and `Delivering Results'. To him, HR is about delivering business performance and organizational capabilities. Cause if you don't, you'll soon be out of business. The tricky part is balancing the soft and hard part of HR. Dave Ulrich has many good concepts to make that happen. This book is not a bad place to start, if you'd like to pick his brains...

Peter Leerskov,
M.Sc. in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business

Unlike other books on Six Sigma that focus on variation reduction, statistics and other tools, this book is full of practical examples of techniques and implementation tips. The focal point of the book is on the process of generating the turnaround in a large conglomerate such as GE. In this case the aspects of organizational behavior constitute THE critical success factor (rather than statistical/other tools). Workout has undoubtedly been fundamental for generating the cultural transformation in GE. This book is addressing these organizational behavior aspects in a pragmatic manner presenting a detailed road-map from planning all the way through implementation.
Most examples deal with administration/bureaucracy and I would have expected to read more on operational aspects such as value chain improvement in a Production/Logistics environment.
This book is a must for top managers that search for a generic methodology to translate their vision into reality.

This book contains many interesting stories for non-GE people like me. These stories describe how the workout methodology was developed at GE and several other organizations. In this context, it has many useful examples of how to deploy the workout methodology along with checklists and examples. After reading the book, I believe that a person could create and hold a successful workout. In my opinion, this is how a book like this shows its real value.

There's no denying the effectiveness of the Work-Out system at General Electric (GE). This book is a straightforward and comprehensive introduction to what Work-Oout means and how it helped GE achieve such astonishing results under Jack Welch, who introduced it. This clear, well-organized book makes it possible for any executive or manager to apply at least some elements of the work-out program in any organizational context. We do caution you, however, that the Work-Out program as portrayed here demands a great deal of commitment and moral fortitude from leaders. Empowerment may be effective, but it is rarely comfortable for the powers that be. Just ask "Neutron Jack."

Worked at GE for awhile and wanted to read something on the Work-Out process. Seems like a pretty comprehensive overview. Got it for a "how-to" manual and to convince my manager of the efficacy of the process.

The idea of Work-Out started in 1989 as a way to push cultural change throughout General Electric. Neutron Jack had just streamlined the workforce, but the work processes had not been redesigned well enough to acknowledge the difference. So Jack (and a bunch of consultants) developed the Work-Out to literally "work" the bureaucracy, rework duplication of effort and other waste out of the process. The whole point of holding a Work-Out event is to maximize the number of high quality ideas for change and to carve out a doable list of actions that will deliver fast results on the improvement opportunity.

So what makes a Work-Out unique? First, the people who do the work define the issues and develop recommendations. Then, leadership makes the decision "on the spot" so all involved with making the recommendations know the status. Every recommendation has an implementation owner and a champion (a business manager who has the clout to make the approved recommendation a reality). Finally, every approved recommendation has the highest level of commitment to action (in other words, leadership gets in front of the action versus "behind" or supporting the recommendation). That means all obstacles are removed for swift action. It's all about easy fixes and quick successes in an enironment ripe for reducing waste - not long, complex science projects!

I picked this book up in preparation for leading some discussions on Kaizen. It was interesting to get a complete picture of the way GE held such events. It is thorough (although GE-centric as you'd expect). Is there anything magical in here? Probably not. If you are looking for a more complete understanding of kaizens and other workshops this is a useful resource.

The GE Workout is a simple and straightforward process for solving problems. The brilliance of Workout is it is simple enough that people can actually put it to use. Any company, organization, group or individual can use the Workout process to tackle problems of any size.

Those who have studied Six Sigma know it can quickly become overly complex. The does not happen with the Workout process. Workout is simple, easy to apply and can produce startling results, often quickly.

If you are frustrated by inefficiencies, process bottle-necks or dealing with the same nagging problems where you work, give this book to your CEO and urge him or her to start utilizing the GE Workout process.

Not every problem can be solved. But many can. Not every problem can be solve quickly. But many can. For those problems that can be addressed, including many that can be resolved in days or weeks - not months or years - Workout can be a life saver.

Highly recommended.

This is one of the worst books I've ever purchased. The ideas in this book could be fully explained in no more than two or three pages. I bought it relying on the CV's of the authors but it turned out to be a true dud. It rehashes the same ideas over and over and over and over. It's for the braindead.