[brandonmenc]

My father worked his way up from the foundry to "Business Leader" (management) at GE, starting in the mid 1970s.

GE was a mess internally, all the way down to the shop floor, before Welch took over. His impact cannot be understated.

We were big Jack Welch fans - if he hadn't grown GE the way he did, my hometown - where it was the largest employer for decades - would have been a lot poorer.

[wnissen]

So I've read the big GE management book written by the folks at Crotonville, and concluded that Welch did a lot right, like moving responsibility within the company to the level where the knowledge is, and shedding units that were fundamentally unprofitable. I think you're right that as manufacturing shifted toward globalized supply chains that a certain amount of pain was inevitable and necessary.

However, it seems like a lot of his financial results came from "shaping" the quarterly earnings and various unsustainable practices. And for whatever reason his the culture he brought to the company has left his successors overseeing a company that has performed as one of the worst in the whole S&P over the last 15 years. Even if you take a pure industrial company like US Steel, which I don't think anyone would point to as being on the vanguard of management or product, GE is not doing all that well. I dunno. My pet theory is that "leaning" an organization is really a one-time thing, and that it's very challenging to do so without also removing the "seed corn" of research and even development of the next big thing. Though, to be fair, Edison himself had a wildly inconsistent financial record.

[danmaz74]

Would you mind expanding what you think he did right? I'm curious to have a counterpoint to the other top comments, which are pretty negative.

[michaelt]

In some fields, acclaimed works seem cliched and obvious from where we are today, because the innovations that brought their acclaim have been so universally adopted.

I'm not a historian of management theory so I don't know if the ideas are original, or even of how well Welch followed his own advice, but plenty of the things in his books are straight-talking common sense:

* You should know your business well enough you don't need management consultants to tell you what to do

* HR and hiring are important and should be represented in your senior team accordingly

* If you want candour (which you do) you need to reward and praise it, not punish it

* When there's a crisis, don't deny there's a problem

He's not the first person to come up with every idea in his books, but even 40 years later there are companies that need to learn these things.

[DavidAdams]

If you're trying to turn around a mis-managed company, a few rounds of identifying and eliminating people in the manager ranks that aren't pulling their weight could have a huge positive impact. So I could see that "neutron" Jack's stack ranking could have been great, had it been limited. But when you're consumed with your own genius, you tend to think that the thing that seemed to work, and everyone praised you for yesterday will keep working tomorrow.

[codazoda]

I had the amazing opportunity to sit through a training where Jack Welch came to our company and taught a dozen of us his simple time management system. This was back in 1996 and I’ve been using some of the idea’s he gave us ever since. His philosophy about focusing on creating leaders seemed solid. His philosophy on rank-and-yank cost him a lot of fans.

[mo1ok]

any link to or summary of his ideas?