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

~ Dave Ulrich (Author), Steve Kerr (Author), Ron Ashkenas (Author) "IN MOST ORGANIZATIONS, change efforts come and go-and somehow rarely make a difference..." (more)
Key Phrases: Town Meeting, Jack Welch, Eagle Star (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Many companies have adapted Jack Welch's now-famous strategies for running a business. Taking advantage of Welch's popularity (and expertise), this handbook lays out instructions for implementing GE's "Work-Out" method. Flexible in execution, the method calls for collecting large teams of employees for defining tough business decisions, then breaking into smaller teams to develop solutions. The small teams then meet with a manager in a "town meeting" to discuss their recommendations. The result is change that's brought about by employees themselves. Consultants Ulrich and Ashkenas, along with Kerr (a managing director of Goldman Sachs) were brought together by Welch to create the "Work-Out" method.

Product Description

Famous "Work-Out" change-management tool explained by the people who helped develop it.

GE's legendary Work-Out program played a key role in the company's phenomenal success over the past decade and has been implemented in many other organizations. Now three executives and consultants who developed the original Work-Out approach at GE­­often working directly with CEO Jack Welch­­discuss the inner workings of Work-Out and their experiences at successfully implementing the program at GE.

Filled with effective assessment and decisionmaking tools, The GE Work-Out provides concrete and realistic guidance for anyone who wants to implement Work-Out and break down bureaucracy and hierarchy within an organization.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (March 25, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071384162
• ISBN-13: 978-0071384162
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #183,592 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good Idea - Bad Book, December 18, 2003

By	A Six Sigma Black Belt and Manager (Chicago) - See all my reviews

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sound advice for delivering speed, simplicity, and solutions, January 7, 2005

By	Peter Leerskov "The Strategist, www.lace.dk" (Denmark) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

'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

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great. Lots of first-hand tips to turnaround a large company, March 27, 2003

By	Amir Aharon (Tel Aviv, Israel) - See all my reviews

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.