Winning(赢)JackWelch杰克韦尔奇

Winning(赢)JackWelch杰克韦尔奇 Winning(赢)JackWelch杰克韦尔奇 Jack Welch with Suzy Welch WIN NING To the thousands of men and women who cared enough about business to raise their hands The authors’ pro?ts from this book are being donated to charity. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION “Every Day,There Is a New Question” 1 UNDERNEATH IT ALL 1. MISSION AND VALUES So Much Hot Air About Something So Real 13 2. CANDOR The Biggest Dirty Little Secret in Business 25 3. DIFFERENTIATION Cruel and Darwinian? Try Fair and Effective 37 4. VOICE AND DIGNITY Every Brain in the Game 53 ―v ― CONTENTS YOUR COMPANY 5. LEADERSHIP It’s Not Just About You 61 6. HIRING What Winners Are Made Of 81 7. PEOPLE MANAGEMENT You’ve Got the Right Players. Now What? 97 8. PARTING WAYS Letting Go Is Hard to Do 119 9. CHANGE Mountains Do Move 133 10.CRISIS MANAGEMENT From Oh-God-No to Yes-We’re-Fine 147 YOUR COMPETITION 11. STRATEGY It’s All in the Sauce 165 12.BUDGETING Reinventing the Ritual 189 13. ORGANIC GROWTH So You Want to Start Something New 205 14. MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS Deal Heat and Other Deadly Sins 217 15. SIX SIGMA Better Than a Trip to the Dentist 245 ― vi ― CONTENTS YOUR CAREER 16. THE RIGHT JOB Find It and You’ll Never Really Work Again 255 17. GETTING PROMOTED Sorry, No Shortcuts 277 18. HARD SPOTS That Damn Boss 299 19.WORK-LIFE BALANCE Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Having It All But Were Afraid to Hear 313 TYING UP LOOSE ENDS 20.HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE The Questions That Almost Got Away 339 Acknowledgments 360 Index 363 About the Author Other Books by Jack Welch Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher ― vii ― Introduction “EVERY DAY, THERE IS A NEW QUESTION” F T E R I F I N I S H E D my autobiography―a fun but crazily Aintense grind that I wedged into the corners of my real job at the time―I swore I’d never write another book again. But I guess I did. My excuse, if there is one, is that I didn’t actually come up with the idea for this book. It was given to me. It was a retirement present, if you will, from the tens of thou- sands of terri?c people I have met since I left GE―the energized, curious, gutsy, and ambitious men and women who have loved business enough to ask me every possible question you could imagine. In order to answer them, all I had to do was ?gure out what I knew, sort it out, codify it, and borrow their stories―and this book was off and running. The questions I’m referring to ?rst started during the promo- tional tour for my autobiography in late 2001 and through much of 2002, when I was overwhelmed by the emotional attachment ― 1 ― INTRODUCTION people seemed to have to GE. From coast to coast, and in many countries around the world, people told me touching stories about their experiences working for the company, or what hap- pened when their sister, dad, aunt, or grandfather did. But with these stories, I was also surprised to hear how much more people wanted to know about getting business right. Radio call-in guests pressed me to explain GE’s system of differentiation, which separates employees into three performance categories and manages them up or out accordingly. People attending book-signing events wanted to know if I really meant it when I said the head of human resources at every company should be at least as important as the CFO. I did! At a visit to the University of Chicago business school, an MBA from India asked me to explain more fully what a really good performance appraisal should sound like. The questions didn’t stop after the book tour. They contin- ued―in airports, restaurants, and elevators. Once a guy swam over to me in the surf off Miami Beach to ask me what I thought about a certain franchise opportunity he was considering. But mainly they’ve come at the 150 or so Q & A sessions I have participated in over the past three years, in cities around the world from New York to Shanghai, from Milan to Mexico City. In these sessions, which have ranged from thirty to ?ve thousand audience mem- bers, I sit on a stage with a moderator, usually a business journalist, and I try to answer anything the audience wants to throw at me. And throw they have―questions about everything from cop- ing with Chinese competition, to managing talented but dif?cult people, to ?nding the perfect job, to implementing Six Sigma, to hiring the right team, to leading in uncertain times, to surviving mergers and acquisitions, to devising a killer strategy. What should I do, I’ve heard, if I deliver great results but I work for a jerk who doesn’t seem to care, or if I’m the only person in my ― 2 ― INTRODUCTION company who thinks change is necessary, or if the budget process in my company is full of sandbagging, or I’m about to launch a great new product and headquarters doesn’t want to give me the autonomy and resources I need? What can I do, people have asked, if managers in my company don’t really tell it like it is, or I have to let go of an employee I really like but who just can’t hack it, or I have to help lead my orga- nization through the crisis we’ve been trying to deal with for a year? There have been questions about juggling the colliding demands of kids, career, and all that other stuff you want to do, like play golf, renovate your house, or raise money in a walkathon. There have been questions about landing the promotion of your dreams―without making any enemies. There have been ques- tions about macroeconomic trends, emerging industries, and currency ?uctuations. There have been literally thousands of questions. But most of them come down to this: What does it take to win? And that is what this book is about―winning. Probably no other topic could have made me want to write again! Because I think winning is great. Not good―great. Winning in business is great be- cause when companies win, people thrive and grow. There are more I have been asked jobs and more opportunities every - where and for everyone. People feel literally thousands of upbeat about the future; they have questions. But most the resources to send their kids to of them come down college, get better health care, buy to this: What does it vacation homes, and secure a com- take to win? fortable retirement. And winning affords them the opportunity to ― 3 ― INTRODUCTION give back to society in hugely im- I think winning is portant ways beyond just paying great. Not good― more taxes―they can donate time and money to charities and mentor great. Because when in inner-city schools, to name just companies win, people two. Winning lifts everyone it thrive and grow. There touches―it just makes the world a are more jobs and more better place. When companies are losing, on opportunities. the other hand, everyone takes a hit. People feel scared. They have less ?- nancial security and limited time or money to do anything for anyone else. All they do is worry and upset their families, and in the meantime, if they’re out of work, they pay little, if any, taxes. Let’s talk about taxes for a minute. In fact, let’s talk about gov- ernment in general. Obviously, government is a vital part of society. First and fore- most, it does nothing less than protect us all from the insidious and persistent challenges to national security that are with us now and for the foreseeable future. But government provides much more: the justice system, education, police and ?re protection, highways and ports, welfare and hospitals. The list could go on and on. But even with the virtues of government, it is critical to re- member that all of its services come from some form of tax rev- enue. Government makes no money of its own. And in that way, government is the support for the engine of the economy, it is not the engine itself. Winning companies and the people who work for them are the engine of a healthy economy, and in providing the revenues for government, they are the foundation of a free and democratic society. ― 4 ― INTRODUCTION That’s why winning is great. Now, it goes without saying that you have to win the right way―cleanly and by the rules. That’s a given. Companies and people that don’t compete fairly don’t deserve to win, and thanks to well-honed internal company processes and government regu- latory agencies, the bad guys are usually found and kicked out of the game. But companies and people in business that are honest―and that’s the vast, vast majority―must ?nd the way to win. This book offers a road map. It is not, incidentally, a road map just for senior level managers and CEOs. If this book helps them, terri?c. I hope it does. But this book is also very much for people on the front lines: business owners, middle managers, people running factories, line workers, college graduates looking at their ?rst jobs, MBAs considering new careers, and entrepreneurs. My main goal with this book is to help the people with ambition in their eyes and passion running through their veins, wherever they are in an organization. You will meet a lot of people in this book. Some may remind you of yourself, some may just seem very familiar: There’s the CEO who presents the company with a list of noble values―say, quality, customer service, and respect―but never really explains what it means to live them. There’s the mid- dle manager who fumes during a meeting with another division of his company, knowing that his coworkers could do so much more―if they just stopped patting themselves on the back for a minute. There is the employee who has been underperforming for years but is just so friendly and nice―and clueless―you can’t bring yourself to let her go. There is the colleague you can’t look in the eye because he is a “Dead Man Walking,” slowly and painfully being managed out the door. There are the employees who eat lunch every day at what they have dubbed “The Table ― 5 ― INTRODUCTION of Lost Dreams,” making a show Have a positive attitude of their resentment of authority. and spread it around, There’s the engineer who spent ?fteen years building a great career, never let yourself be a only to throw it in one day when she victim, and for goodness’ realized that she had juggled life and sake―have fun. work to make everyone happy―but herself. You’ll also meet a lot of people whose stories are examples of innovation, insight, and grit. There’s David Novak, the energetic young CEO of Yum! Brands, who has turned every one of Yum!’s more than thirty- three thousand restaurant chain outlets into a laboratory of new ideas and the entire organization into a learning machine. There’s Denis Nayden, the consummate change agent, who never settles for good enough and has intensity to burn. There’s Jimmy Dunne, who rebuilt his company out of the ashes of the World Trade Center, using love, hope, and an attitude that anything is possible. There’s Susan Peters, a working mother and the No. 2 HR execu- tive at GE, who could write a book herself on successfully navi- gating the hills and valleys of work-life balance. There is Chris Navetta, the CEO of U.S. Steel Kosice, who helped transform a struggling city in Slovakia while turning a former state-owned steel mill into a ?ourishing, pro?table enterprise. There’s Kenneth Yu, the head of 3M’s Chinese operations, who catapulted his busi- nesses from modest to high growth by throwing out the phony ritual of annual budgeting and replacing it with a sky’s-the-limit dialogue about opportunities. There’s Mark Little, who was devas- tated after a demotion at GE but fought his way back to a huge promotion with courage, perseverance, and great results. People are everything when it comes to winning, and so this book is a lot about people―in some cases, the mistakes they’ve ― 6 ― INTRODUCTION made, but more often, their successes. But mostly this book is about ideas and the power of putting them into action. Now, at this point, there might be readers out there who are skeptical. They’re thinking: Winning is just too nuanced and com- plex a topic to cover in twenty chapters. I don’t care how many people and ideas are in this book! Yes, winning is nuanced and complex, not to mention brutally hard. But it also happens to be achievable. You can win. But to do that, you need to know what makes winning happen. This book offers no easy formulas. There are none. Depending on the chapter, this book does, however, give you guidelines to follow, rules to consider, assumptions to adopt, and mistakes to avoid. The strategy chapter provides a three-step process; the chapter on ?nding the right job offers you good signs and warning signals. There are also several themes you’ll hear again and again: the team with the best players wins, so ?nd and retain the best players; don’t overbrain things to the point of inaction; no matter what part of a business you’re in, share learning relentlessly; have a positive attitude and spread it around; never let yourself be a victim; and for goodness’ sake―have fun. Yes, have fun. Business is a game, and winning that game is a total blast! THE ROAD AHEAD Before we get started, a word on how this book is organized. It has four parts. The ?rst, called “Underneath It All,”is conceptual. It certainly contains more management philosophy than most businesspeople have time for on any given day, and certainly more than I ever thought about in one sitting when I was working the day shift. But ― 7 ― INTRODUCTION there is a substructure of principles to my approach to business, and so I lay them out in this ?rst part. In brief, the four principles are about the importance of a strong mission and concrete values; the absolute necessity of can- dor in every aspect of management; the power of differentiation, meaning a system based on meritocracy; and the value of each in- dividual receiving voice and dignity. The next section of this book, “Your Company,” is about the innards of organizations. It’s about mechanics―people, processes, and culture. Its chapters look at leadership, hiring, people manage- ment, letting people go, managing change, and crisis management. After “Your Company” comes “Your Competition,” the sec- tion of this book about the world outside your organization. It dis- cusses how you create strategic advantages, devise meaningful budgets, grow organically, grow through mergers and acquisitions, and it attempts to demystify a topic that never ceases to intrigue and baf?e people, the quality program Six Sigma. The next section of this book is called “Your Career,” and it’s about managing the arc and the quality of your professional life. It starts with a chapter on ?nding the right job, not just a ?rst job but the right job at any point in your career. It also includes a chapter on what it takes to get promoted, and another on a hard spot we all ?nd ourselves in at one time or another―working for a bad boss. The last chapter of this section addresses the very human desire to have it all―all at the same time―which as you already know, you can’t really do. You can, however, know what your boss thinks about the matter, and you should―and that’s one aspect of this chapter. The last section of this book is called “Tying Up Loose Ends,” and in it, I answer nine questions that did not fall into any of the above categories. They concern managing the “China threat,” di- versity, the impact of new regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley ― 8 ― INTRODUCTION Act, and how business should respond to societal crises like AIDS. There is also a question in there about how my successor, Jeff Im- melt, is doing in a word, great , the status of my golf game, and whether I think I’ll go to heaven. Now, that was a question that stopped me! As for the rest of the questions in this book―they didn’t ex- actly stop me, but they did challenge me to think hard about what I believe and why. This book has a lot of answers, but not all―because business is always changing and the world is always changing. As a Dutch entrepreneur said to me last year, “Every day in life, there is a new question. That is what keeps us going.” There are new questions―and new answers too. In fact, I have learned almost as much about business since I left GE as when I worked there. I learned from every single question asked of me. And I hope my responses will help you learn too. ― 9 ― UNDERNEATH IT ALL 1. MISSION AND VALUES So Much Hot Air About Something So Real 13 2. CANDOR The Biggest Dirty Little Secret in Business 25 3. DIFFERENTIATION Cruel and Darwinian? Try Fair and Effective 37 4. VOICE AND DIGNITY Every Brain in the Game 53 1 Mission and Values SO MUCH HOT AIR ABOUT SOMETHING SO REAL E A R W I T H M E , if you will, while I talk about mission Band values. I say that because these two terms have got to be among the most abstract, overused, misunderstood words in business. When I speak with audiences, I’m asked about them frequently, usually with some level of panic over their actual meaning and relevance. In New York, I once got the question “Can you please de?ne the difference between a mission and a value, and also tell us what dif- ference that difference makes?” Business schools add to the con- fusion by having their students regularly write mission statements and debate values, a practice made even more futile for being car- ried out in a vacuum. Lots of companies do the same to their sen- ior executives, usually in an attempt to create a noble-sounding plaque to hang in the company lobby. Too often, these exercises end with a set of generic platitudes that do nothing but leave employees directionless or cynical. Who doesn’t know of a mission statement that reads something like, ― 13 ― UNDERNEATH IT ALL “XYZ Company values quality and service,” or, “Such-and-Such Company is customer-driven.” Tell me what company doesn’t value quality and service or focus on its customers! And who doesn’t know of a company that has spent countless hours in emo- tional debate only to come up with values that, despite the good intentions that went into them, sound as if they were plucked from an all-purpose list of virtues including “integrity, quality, excel- lence, service, and respect.” Give me a break―every decent com- pany espouses these things! And frankly, integrity is just a ticket to the game. If you don’t have it in your bones, you shouldn’t be al- lowed on the ?eld. By contrast, a good mission statement and a good set of values are so real they smack you in the face with their concreteness. The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there. Speaking of that, I prefer abandoning the term values altogether in favor of just behav- iors. But for the sake of tradition, let’s stick with the common ter- minology. FIRST: ABOUT THAT MISSION . . . In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business? It does not answer: What were we good at in the good old days? Nor does it answer: How can we describe our business so that no particular unit or division or senior executive gets pissed off? Instead, the question “How do we intend to win in this busi- ness?” is de?ning. It requires companies to make choices about people, investments, and other resources, and it prevents them from falling into the common mission trap of asserting they will be all things to all people at all times. The question forces compa- ― 14 ― MISSION AND VALUES nies to delineate their strengths and weaknesses in order to assess where they can pro?tably play in the competitive landscape. Yes,pro?tably―that’s the key. Even Ben & Jerry’s,the crunchy- granola, hippy, save-the-world ice cream company based in Vermont, has “pro?table growth” and “increasing value for stake- holders” as one of the elements of its three-part mission statement because its executives know that without ?nancial success, all the social goals in the world don’t have a chance. That’s not saying a mission shouldn’t be bold or aspirational. Ben & Jerry’s, for instance, wants to sell “all natural ice cream and euphoric concoctions” and “improve the quality of life locally, na- tionally and internationally.” That kind of language is great in that it absolutely has the power to excite people and motivate them to stretch. At the end of the day, effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible. They give people a clear sense of the direction to pro?tability and the inspiration to feel they are part of something big and important. Take our mission at GE as an example. From 1981 through 1995, we said we were going to be “the most competitive enter- prise in the world” by being No. 1 or No. 2 in every market― ?xing, selling, or closing every underperforming business that couldn’t get there. There could be no doubt about what this mission meant or entailed. It was speci?c and descriptive, with nothing abstract going on. And it was aspirational, too, in its global ambition. Effective mission This mission came to life in a statements balance bunch of different ways.First off,in a the possible and the time when business strategy was mainly kept in an envelope in head- impossible. quarters and any information about ― 15 ― UNDERNEATH IT ALL it was the product of the company gossip mill, we talked openly about which businesses were already No. 1 or No. 2, and which businesses had to get repaired quickly or be gone. Such candor shocked the system, but it did wonders for making the mission real to our people. They may have hated it when businesses were sold, but they understood why. Moreover, we harped on the mission constantly, at every meet- ing large and small. Every decision or initiative was linked to the mission. We publicly rewarded people who drove the mission and let go of people who couldn’t deal with it for whatever reason, usually nostalgia for their business in the “good old days.” Now, it is possible that in 1981 we could have come up with an entirely different mission for GE. Say after lots of debate and an in-depth analysis of technology, competitors, and customers,we had decided we wanted to become the most innovative designer of elec- trical products in the world. Or say we had decided that our most pro?table route would have been to quickly and thoroughly global- ize every business we had, no matter what its market position. Either of these missions would have sent GE off on an entirely different road from the one we took. They would have required us Setting the mission to buy and sell different businesses than we did, or hire and let go of is top management’s different people, and so forth. But responsibility. A mission technically, I have no argument with cannot be delegated them as missions. They are concrete to anyone except the and speci?c. Without doubt, the electrical products mission would people ultimately held have come as a comfort to most accountable for it. people in GE. After all, that’s what most thought we were. The global ― 16 ― MISSION AND VALUES focus mission would have probably alarmed others. Rapid change usually does. A ?nal word about missions, and it concerns their creation. How do you come up with one? To me, this is a no-brainer. You can get input from anywhere― and you should listen to smart people from every quarter. But set- ting the mission is top management’s responsibility. A mission cannot, and must not, be delegated to anyone except the people ultimately held accountable for it. In fact, a mission is the de?ning moment for a company’s lead- ership. It’s the true test of its stuff. . . . AND NOW ABOUT THOSE VALUES As I said earlier, values are just behaviors―speci?c, nitty-gritty, and so descriptive they leave little to the imagination. People must be able to use them as marching orders because they are the how of the mission, the means to the end―winning. In contrast to the creation of a mission, everyone in a company should have something to say about values.Yes, that can be a messy undertaking. That’s OK. In a small enterprise, everyone can be in- volved in debating them in all kinds of meetings. In a larger orga- nization, it’s a lot tougher. But you can use company-wide meetings, training sessions, and the like, for as much personal dis- cussion as possible, and t