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Jack Welch's goal was to make
GE "the world's
most
competitive enterprise."
He knew that it would take nothing less than a "revolution"
to transform that dream into a reality.
"The model of business in corporate
America in 1980 had not changed in decades. Workers worked, managers
managed, and everyone new their place. Forms and approvals and
bureaucracy
ruled the day." Welch's self-proclaimed revolution meant waging war on GE's
old ways of doing things and
reinventing
the company from top to bottom.
Jack Welch is all about
leadership, not management. Actually,
he wanted to discard the term "manager" altogether because it had come to
mean someone who "controls rather than facilitates, complicates rather than
simplifies, acts more like a governor than an accelerator." Welch has given a
great of thought to how to manage employees effectively so that they are as
productive as possible. An he has come to a seemingly paradoxical view. The
less managing you do the better off your company. Manage less to manage
more.
Welch decided that
GE's leaders, who did too much controlling
and monitoring, had to change their management styles. "Managers
slow things down.
Leaders spark the business to run smoothly, quickly.
Managers talk to one another, write memos to one another. Leaders talk to
their employees, talk with their
employees, filling them with
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Vision, getting them to perform at levels the
employees themselves didn't think possible. Then (and to Welch this is a
critical ingredient) they simply get out of the way."