He's the type of leader who grew the company on a minefield of figurative debt and real hidden costs. Leaving behind something with a solid foundation makes you a good leader. Getting out in time from a Ponzi scheme you built doesn't.
Another trait of a real leader is to be able to grow another leader who can do the same. By his own statements he failed.
It doesn’t really matter. In his book he portrays himself as a great teacher and coach. So not his successor failed but Welch’s mentoring failed. He had all the tools available to bring up a successor but couldn’t do it. Reminds me a little of the US president. Take credit for everything positive that happens and when something goes wrong, point at somebody else and often at somebody he personally selected and hired.
GE crashed nearly a decade after he left. He spent decades building GE into a powerhouse in many industries.
Finding a leader who can replace you is a miniscule piece of being a leader. Also, that's ultimately the Board's responsibility. The CEO reports to them.
Even a weak foundation takes time to crumble. Jack Welch built the foundation for GE's growth on the surface of a bubble that would burst in 2008. Perhaps the real mistake of his successor was not jumping off the pyramid soon enough.
> It goes like this: you can do the wrong things but be in a long enough feedback loop that the effects only really start to show themselves some time later. So rather than successfully correlating results to their real causes, what happens instead is:
> a) people fool themselves in the meantime that bad things aren't bad, and
> b) in the aftermath, when the consequences do start to appear, the temporal offset from the real root cause is so large, and they have so many other things to attribute failures to, that they can (and probably will) go the intellectually dishonest route
Another trait of a real leader is to be able to grow another leader who can do the same. By his own statements he failed.