thinker, doer

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Editor's Note: Most of the management decisions are faced with lack of structure, risk taking and uncertainty, which is a huge test for business leaders. Whether to move forward boldly, make bold decisions and execute them, or move forward cautiously and seek the best balance for all parties reflects the personal style of the leader.

Jack Welch stands for activists who keep going even when they fail. Colleagues and others in the business world were impressed with his style, which stemmed from the vision of an organization he built that was not robust, but transcendent.

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Jack Welch is yet another revolutionary at GE, a man who is always in pursuit of change. Summing up his work as CEO, BusinessWeek said: "He was a edgy, pretentious guy who didn't fit in with the stagnant GE culture. He took the helm in the 1980s with drastic measures. Redundant layoffs brought unprecedented notoriety among the company's rank and file."

"But GE thrived in the 1990s as a result of layoffs. Now that he has increased shareholder value by nearly $500 billion, its The image of the reckless man has been replaced by the image of the management expert."

Welch's effective leadership has become a management authority and has attracted a large following of followers. The ideology that has a place in his leadership style, the kind of bold, courageous, reckless thinking, plays a big role. His ideas are sometimes brilliant and sometimes silly (but just as important), but he has the courage to implement them.

Welch emerged from GE as a wild horse in the eyes of many of his colleagues. In a way, he is that image. His leadership concept is unique. It is generally believed that the top leader of a company must be thoughtful about everything, calmly formulate company systems, and restrain unruly subordinates. At GE under Welch, if anyone needed restraint, it was the chairman himself.

"One thing to be clear about the art of leadership, you can't be a gentle, level-headed, thoughtful, cautious policy publisher, you have to do something crazy," he explained.

General Electric is a manufacturing company, a service company, and a media company, but Welch believes that it is more of a thinking company, which is its most important characteristic. He worked so hard to build the most dynamic thinking company in the world, and he was just a representative of the company. Ideas were the hard currency for GE's success, and Welch himself had to make sure the company produced it in large quantities.

"My job is to capture sparkling ideas, exaggerate them, and spread them as fast as I can on the job," he once said enthusiastically. In his value system, "a hero is the one with the best ideas". He rewards employees with sparks of ideas, even if those ideas fall short of their intended purpose.

"We are looking everywhere for better ideas, even thinking about it every day at work: there's always a better way," he told The Australian Financial Review in 2000. "We believe in this idea, and we're full of The world seeks the light of wisdom."

Welch had no intention of establishing an academic think tank. It's not enough to stand at home plate, you have to be ready to hit the ball, hit a home run or simply go out, don't stand there dumbfounded to hit the ball. "Jack grew up in an environment that encouraged people to take chances," said a senior vice president at General Electric in 1984. "Now he's very religious, and we believe in that. The guy you see swings hard. He missed the ball, but he still got the bonus." Another colleague explained, "The essence of Welch is that he's not afraid to make mistakes."

Welch defended his character when he described it. Say, he's a risk-taker and sometimes blames himself for being too slow! But he also expressed his sympathy for the losers: "I also encourage failure, and even give bonuses to losers because they swipe. Keep swiping."

If the leader is The image of those who dare to take bold actions and act resolutely, who speak with actions and who would rather participate than stand by, has a special charm in modern culture. Whether on TV, in politics, or in government departments, we see more talkers than doers. Lots of sycophants, few independent thinkers; we hear lots of reasons why things can't be done, and few valuable suggestions for what can be done.

Jack Welch sets an example for leaders. He believed in action, not in rhetoric. He was always aggressive and enthusiastic, but also short-tempered and sometimes violent. For those in lower positions based on circumstance or character, the sight of Doer Welch, who billed himself as a lunatic, was inspiring and heart-warming. In particular, Welch worked in a large, dead, rutted company.

Leaders must make decisions, and quickly. Welch apparently dislikes managers who say "maybe", and the word barely makes it into his vocabulary. "Welch may say 'yes' or 'no', but he never says 'maybe'," one manager told BusinessWeek in 1998, and another with a wry smile: " Jack is impatient...it's his insufficiency." BusinessWeek said, for example, that General Financial's management spent months analyzing the feasibility of acquiring AT&T's universal credit card and finally decided to buy it. They handed Welch a detailed presentation, and Welch replied within 24 hours - no.

As big as rafters

Welch said he lived "on the verge of madness". The business world won't be waiting long for him to prove his claims. He had taken drastic measures in the early days, such as remediation and streamlining, to enable GE to compete in the international market. The practice hits a company culture accustomed to taking incremental steps. "Don't move forward slowly, jump forward." This is his creed.

In December 1985, Welch held a press conference in New York City to announce the $6.28 billion acquisition of ABC and its crown jewel, NBC. This is exactly the portrayal of Welch's Creed. The acquisition was made using GE's savings from the first four years of streamlining its organization.

At the time, it was the largest non-oil acquisition ever. GE is now a player in the media and entertainment industry and owns the most valuable television programming brand within ABC.

The merger shocked Wall Street and established Welch's status as a dealmaker in the early years. His leadership style and GE culture blended into the NBC culture, another Welch achievement. Purists in the press complained about Welch's policies of cost control and budget cuts, but GE and NBC's burgeoning prosperity proved a successful marriage, and they had nothing to say.

Welch's critic Thomas F. O'Boyle admits: "The shift at NBC illustrates the many virtues of Welch's management style. Always a helping hand. He loves sports, he has high spirits, and he has a plan to win thousands of miles away."

Welch is Welch after all, and he never misses a chance. He had tried to get into creative territory, suggesting that NBC management make a TV series based on the Michael Douglas film "Wall Street." While others criticized and even laughed at the idea, the gentle, humble Welch said, "I'm going back to the company, and they'll listen to me."

Through the 1990s, the merger of media companies into large multimedia communications companies has become a trend. Although NBC's ratings climbed to the top of the charts, Jack Welch wanted to incorporate NBC into Eisner's 1994 when he met Disney president Michael Eisner. Disney Company. Welch's sale of part of NBC to Disney attached a number of conditions, and Eisner felt firsthand the rafters of Welch's big money.

"Jack had me at the mercy of me, and I couldn't get enough of it," he recalls. "He said it was a great deal, and he totally convinced me that I was almost ready to take it."

Eisner stepped into the elevator and Welch's magic faded away, only to realize that Welch had made an unequal deal with him. The next day, when he called Welch to say no to the deal, Welch laughed, as if to say, "Ouch, you saw me!"

There was also a small purchase with RCA. Buying and selling produces another ending. Another example of Welch's penchant for taking a risk was his sale of his consumer electronics division, including ABC's No. 1 TV business with a 17 percent market share, to France's Thomson. What's important about the deal is that GE gets its X-ray tube and medical device company CGR in exchange. But it also brought a lot of trouble and created a financial burden. Welch "traded a well-run company for a disease-ridden company," O'Boyle remarked. Others feel the same way.

Falling down

Welch's indirect succession of acquisition decisions during his tenure gave GE dozens, if not hundreds, of well-run companies. But, as the Consumer Electronics/CGR deal shows, there is a risk that Welch's acquisitions will work against him. If you pursue the rapid growth of the total amount in order to save the accumulation of development, then you are likely to fail completely while making rapid progress.

GE's 1986 acquisition of the brokerage firm of Kidder Peabody is one example. Kidder's scandal broke in 1994, and GE lost more than $1 billion. The incident not only devastated Kidder, but Welch's business reputation as well, raising questions about another core tenet of Welch's leadership philosophy. For Welch, one of the benefits of GE's size is its ability to weather the occasional failure. "The biggest advantage of being big is that you can hit the ball more often," he said, "because the more you hit the ball, the better the chance of hitting."

He also sees frustration as a leadership value for employees manifestation. "I've always told my employees that if your top leadership makes the biggest mistake in the company, you shouldn't hold back in fear," he said of the Kidder acquisition.

Lightning Strike

There's one more thing Jack Welch wants to fix right away, his $45 billion bid to buy Honeywell.

The deal exemplifies Welch's style, with his bravado and bluff in his actions. In the fall of 2000, he got word in the final days before Honeywell and United Technologies Corp., a longtime foe of General Electric, were about to reach a merger agreement. After the leak of United Technologies' cards, Welch worked frantically for a week to devise a better plan himself. While he was socially active, he reached out to board members on his cell phone. When Welch learned that Honeywell's executive committee was meeting in a closed conference room to discuss the final touches on the merger, he asked an aide to interrupt the meeting to inform attendees that GE had made a higher bid. Welch scribbled a few lines of numbers on the manuscript paper, which he then faxed over.

United Technologies is reluctant to start a bidding war with GE 'Mad Men' because Welch's pockets are full of bills. So, the tide turned abruptly, and Honeywell accepted GE's terms. "Welch is amazing, he outbid us after he confirmed our business decisions," United Technologies CEO George Davey pointed out.

Honeywell accepted the last-minute bid, allegedly because Welch was willing to change a retirement plan that had been carefully planned over the years, agreeing to extend the CEO's tenure until the end of 2001, not as planned on April 4 of that year. month to retire. Welch told his wife about it at a restaurant in New York City. "She was very sad in the restaurant because our original plans had changed."

Jack Welch made a bold last-minute decision, and that's how he completed his business career. He single-handedly orchestrated the biggest corporate merger yet, defeated a longtime nemesis, showed strong competitiveness again, and disrupted the retirement plans that GE, the financial industry and his wife had prepared for him for years.

"The easiest thing to do is to not do the deal, retire with honor, and listen to the compliments of others saying, 'Goodbye Jack, great job'," he recalled after announcing his retirement. He knew the risk he was taking from start to finish: "I could have swept away and made a name for myself, but I stuck my neck in the noose."

In the spring of 2001, Welch realized that his hunch was that correct. The merger has already been approved by U.S. officials, but in the new global situation, it also needs the approval of European officials. But they hesitated, claiming that the GE-Honeywell merger constituted unfair competition.

In mid-June, Welch went to Brussels to negotiate with stereotypical EU officials, but made no progress. Welch even offered to cut Honeywell's funding by billions, but could not persuade EU officials. Their proposed approval conditions are too onerous and will negate the effect of mergers and acquisitions. Welch's final decision to stop the acquisition of Honeywell reminds people of Reagan's withdrawal from the Reykjavik Conference (that is, the 1984 US-Soviet summit, when the Soviet Union proposed the conditions for signing a new treaty, requiring U.S. abandons strategic defense plan). He had many expectations, but after a number of setbacks, he finally decided to end the deal.

Critics finally have a valid excuse to lash out at Welch. After all, many observers had long expected European officials to get in trouble. "Mr. Welch, who is good at judging the situation in the business world, miscalculated the situation from the beginning," The New York Times commented in an article titled "Jack Welch's Rare Miscalculation." Didn't expect Europeans to care so much about unfair competition and say that European officials will find 'this is the cleanest deal they've ever seen'." A former Honeywell manager, who asked not to be named "We all worship Welch like a god, but he did make a serious mistake this time," the person told BusinessWeek. He was spot on and straight to the point. When Welch looked back on his last big deal, he didn't give in, then took it with a grain of salt, and ended up with nothing but self-deprecation. As for why he took such a big step in the final moments of his career, he replied: "I had to do it and I will do it in the future. I wasn't thinking about retirement, I was thinking about how to make the company better. , I'm taking this opportunity. I've given it all, but it's not enough."

Welch is bitter about whether he plans to advise other companies on business strategy after he retires from GE : "If I were working in a consulting firm, I think many would scoff at my advice on how to deal with the EU."

Building a culture of "beyond"

Welch has led by example throughout his tenure as chairman. He wants the entire group to grow, to innovate in thinking and to move forward beyond the limits. These practices were rewarding and exciting for Welch as CEO, but it's easy to embroider, and it's not so easy to instill a similar approach into employees at all levels. So Welch tried to make bold exploration a corporate institution through a method called "transcendence."

Beyond is "meaning going beyond your current capabilities - 'planning' to achieve what you can possibly achieve: setting 'impossible' goals and then striving to achieve them", he said on February 9, 1996 explained in a letter to shareholders today. Of course, both workers and managers have to keep their feet on the ground, one step at a time, to create performance and achieve goals. And then, Welch wondered what their plan to go beyond the limits was and what grand goals they were striving for: not just to survive, but to grow; what else they could do to make the individual and his team famous .

"The atmosphere of transcendence replaces a rigid state of hard work and determination to play at what you have. It's about asking, how much better can you do?" he concluded in 1995, "In short Above all, transcendence means 'everything is possible'. The transcendence goals that companies set inspire enthusiasm and imagination."

Welch recognized that subordinates had less wiggle room than their bosses, so they were afraid to go public Announcing its ambitious goals and taking responsibility for fear of not achieving it. But he insisted, "The question is not whether we have achieved our goals, the key is that we have broken the 110-year-old traditional model with transcendental thinking, and we have new goals to strive for."

In Welch's system of values, scientific decision-making and practical action trump rhetoric, planning and contemplation. Taking action in the Welch Way takes courage, hard work, and unending drive, and it is not only a model of effective, brilliant leadership, but a personal behavior that we want to see in ourselves. Big plans and lofty ideas are nothing, but their brave and decisive implementation—even when happiness, security, and reputation are at stake—is what counts.

This article is authorized by CITIC Publishing House and is excerpted from the book "The Art of Welch's Leadership" by James W. Robinson, published by the agency in May 2004.