Jack Welch is considered by many to be the best CEO of all time. He was the CEO of General Electric (GE) and grew the company’s value by more than 4,000% over the course of his twenty year tenure. Jack is now worth over $750 million.
Jack wrote a book with his wife Suzy Welch wrote a book called Winning on being successful in your professional career as well as in life. Winning: The Answers was a sequel to serve as a response to the massive number of questions they received about the first book. Jack and Suzy compiled their favorite and most common questions and answered them in detail with each question forming a mini-chapter. This book is a fantastic read because it is jam-packed with valuable information and you can easily pick a question/answer that interests you then quickly go onto to the next question.
***Disclaimer: I do not claim to own the rights of the content below. All rights are reserved for Jack and Suzy Welch and HarperCollins Publishing.**
Below are my favorite quotes from the book. The quotes in bold were my personal favorites. Enjoy!
Without a doubt, innovation is the most sustainable way to compete in today’s global marketplace.
The first form of innovation is exactly what you would expect: the discovery of something original and useful – a new molecule, a breakthrough piece of software, a game-changing technology. The second kind of innovation is less glorified, but just as effective. It is the continuous, aggressive improvement of what you already sell or how you already do business.
In real best-practices cultures, the fanatic pursuit of new ideas is baked into the mission of the company. Moreover, searching for best practices and the desire to continuously learn and improve are behaviors that are evaluated in every performance appraisal and rewarded financially. In best-practices cultures, leaders hire and promote only people who have a thirst for continuous learning.
Business is about managing risk – not running from it.
Any leader trying to galvanize change has to make a case – and make it personal. Your people will change when, and only when, they see how new behaviors will improve the company and, more important, their own lives. So, get gritty and detailed. Use as much data as you can gather on industry dynamics, profit margins, emerging technologies, political trends – whatever – to come up with two vivid story lines, one about what the company will become if it doesn’t change and the other if it does.
Good companies know that the sooner you put local executives in charge of foreign operations the better. And the best companies work hard from the day they arrive to find and develop local talent with global training programs, creating a pipeline chock-full of middle managers with a shot at the top.
Five Essential Traits of Leaders
- Positive Energy
- The capacity to go-go-go with healthy vigor and an upbeat attitude through good times and bad.
- Ability to Energize Others
- Ability to Make tough calls
- The talent to Execute and Get Things Done
- Passion
Therefore, your best strategy is to go hire for energy, the ability to energize and passion. Then go full force in training and developing edge and execution.
The fact is, being a leader changes everything. Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. It is about your achievement. Your performance. Your individual contributions. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. It is about making the people who work for you smarter, bigger and bolder. Put another way: your success as a leader will come not from what you do everyday, but from the reflected glory of your team’s performance.
Use total candor, which happens incidentally to be one of the defining characteristics of effective leaders.
Top performers with great results tend to worry and complain a lot less about “tough” bosses than people struggling to meet expectations.
A candid, rigorous appraisal system, conducted at least twice a year to start, will let your people know how well they are delivering results and demonstrating the values. The appraisal system must differentiate or it will be meaningless. In other words, it must results in praises, raises and promotions for the best who buy into the company mission and values, and just the opposite for those who don’t.
Nothing overcomes resistance to change faster than success, especially if that success improves the lives and careers of the team who made it happen.
How to build trust: Say what you mean and do what you say.
Trust dies two ways:
- When people aren’t candid with one another
- When people say one thing and do another.
People are motivated when they feel as if they are at the top of the mountain and as if they are still climbing it. Create a work environment with just the right balance of achievement and challenge. People need a feeling of success to be excited about work. But they get bored if they are not being tested too – that is, if they are not learning and growing.
Of course you want your employees to be happy, but their happiness needs to come from the company’s success, not from their every need being met.
Leaders are generally not judged on their personal output. Rather, most leaders are judged on how well they have hired, coached, and motivated their people, individually and collectively – all of which shows up in the results.
Managing superior employees is just like managing regular types. You have everything to gain from celebrating their growth – and nothing at all to fear.
When you build a company where people really want to work, you have got your hands on one of the most powerful competitive advantages in the game, the ability to hire and field the best team.
Checklist to assess your company’s progress:
- Preferred employers demonstrate a real commitment to continuous learning. These companies invest in the development of their people with classes, training programs, and off-site experiences, all sending the message that the organization is eager to facilitate a steady path to personal growth.
- Preferred employers are meritocracies. Pay and promotions are tightly linked to performance, and rigorous appraisal systems consistently let people know where they stand.
- Preferred employers not only allow people to take risks, they celebrate those who do, and don’t shoot those who fail trying.
- Preferred employers understand that what is good for society is also good for business. They are diverse and global in their outlook and environmentally sensitive in their practices.
- Preferred employers keep their hiring standards tight.
- Preferred employers are profitable and growing. A rising stock price is a real hiring manager.
Very often, bosses do not come right out and tell under-performers how badly they are doing until, in a burst of frustration, they fire them. That is terribly unfair to the person at the receiving end and often very disruptive to the business itself.
In the end, candor always works, and it always makes work better. Once you dispense with mixed messages and phony performance reviews, a team never fails to become faster, more creative, and more energetic.
Once you become a manager, candor is your job. It is you obligation to let everyone who works from you know exactly where they stand. That is how you build the best team – and win.
Small companies can come up with their strategy just by probing five key questions:
- What does the competitive playing field look like?
- What have our competitors been up to lately?
- What have we done lately?
- What future events or possible changes keep us up at night with worry?
- And, given all that, what is our winning move?
Consultants want to come into a company, solve its mess, and then hang around finding and solving other messes – forever. Managers want consultants to come in, solve their specific problem fast, and get out, also forever. The tension between these conflicting goals is what makes the use of consultants intractably problematic.
Three Key Performance Indicators that really work:
- Employee engagement
- Test once a year in anonymous surveys where people feel completely safe to speak their minds. Ask questions like, “Do you believe the company has a set of goals that people fully grasp, accept, and support?” and “Do you feel that the company cares about you and that you have been given the opportunity to grow?”
- Customer Satisfaction
- Go to see your most difficult customers, the ones whose orders are inconsistent or dropping. Go to see the ones your salespeople like to see themselves.
- Cash Flow
- Free cash flows tells you the true condition of your business.
At too many companies, HR gets it wrong – either operating as a cloack-and-dagger society or a health-and-happiness sideshow. Point blank: HR should be every single company’s killer app. What could possibly be more important than who gets hired, developed, promoted, or moved out the door.
Companies need to fill HR with a special kind of hybrid: people who are one part pastor, hearing all sins and complaints without recrimination, and one part parent, loving and nurturing but giving it to your straight when you are off track.
Leaders need to put their money where their mouth is and get HR to do its real job: Elevating people management to the same level of professionalism and integrity as financial management.
What to look for in hiring great sales professionals:
- Enormous empathy
- Great salespeople feel for their customers. They understand their needs and pressures; they get the challenges of their business. They are geniuses at balancing the interests of the company and the interests of the customer so that, even at the end of difficult negotiations, both sides describe the process as more than fair.
- Trustworthiness
- Their word is good; their handshake means something. They see every sales as part of a long-term relationship, and customers usually respond.
- A mixture of drive, courage, and self-confidence
- Cold calls are brutal. No one likes making them. But the best salespeople want to grow the business so badly that they dive into them relentlessly, day after day, and they have the inner strength not to take inevitable rejections personally.
- They love to go off-road in search of product and customer opportunities
- The best salespeople, for instance, think it is part of their job to regularly bring ideas home from the outer reaches, saying things like, “You know, if we could make XYZ, we could capture a whole new market out here.”
An MBA’s leg up lasts only for a finite period, after which performance takes precedent.
Give your boss something that shocks and awes her, something new and interesting that she can report to her bosses. In time, those kinds of ideas will move the company forward and you upward.
Your resume tells a lot about you, but your honesty and authenticity will impress potential employers more than anything else you can say.
Tough-minded business people realize that competitors, for all their aggravation, serve a purpose. They sharpen your focus. They keep you fierce and hungry. And the best of them raise the bar on every aspect of performance, from innovation to delivery.
Think of winning as setting personal goals and achieving them, and enjoying the experience on the way.
Playing the Infinite Game 