A boss is a person who sees around corners, surrounds himself with smart people and displays resilience. Is it so?
LIONIZED as the greatest mind in business by Fortune magazine and praised by a phalanx of corporate Einsteins, Jack Welch refuses to fade away into the twilight zone — both in work and love.
Obsessed with winning — despite commanding General Electric as its CEO for 21 years, converting it into a goliath — wisdom and sexual drive at the Welch fountain is still oozing out in plentiful.
Winning is the latest title of his book and Suzy is his latest wife. Much younger in years and a mother of four, Suzy, 45, created quite a stir when she interviewed Jack for Harvard Business Review as its editor; raved about him; and began a steamy love affair.
The problem: Jack was a married man. His wife Jane, eavesdropped on their phone sex and spilled the dirt to the media.
Jacks’ greed for money hit the headlines at the same time, when the shareholders of GE learnt that he had bestowed upon himself a shamelessly generous package of retirement perks.
Today, less cocksure and more eager to please his interviewers on telly, Jack and Suzy, his co-author and wife of less than a year, have done the TV circuits. On NBC, he appeared flashing a shocking pink tie (I guess to deflect attention from the sag), and even allowed Katie Couric, his host of Today Show, to shove a finger into her mouth as if to puke when the old geyser told her that he was still very much in love with Suzy.
Four years ago the powerhouse, arrogant and chesty, sporting his trademark turtleneck white jersey with sleeves rakishly pulled up would have given Katie a verbal spanking had she dared poke fun at the Romeo, however ripened.
Frailty of age brings upon softness and makes the owner more magnanimous in his outlook. Jack Welch’s wisdom in hindsight is one such example of how he views success and the strategies to grab it. Gone are his killer instincts.
What does it take to win?
The roadmap to victory, according to Jack, 69, is “nuanced and complex and brutally hard”.
Criticized for firing countless workers in GE, Jack defends himself saying that bosses have to do this on a regular basis: get rid of the least productive, bottom 10 per cent of their work force and reward richly the top employees. You have to make the differentiation, no matter how unfair it appears to others.
While he concedes that the top 10 per cent skim off the cream and live charmed lives as corporate stars, the middle 70 per cent of any organization, form the backbone and must be given respect, rewards and a dignity of voice.
“I have had people come to me and say that their bosses are jerks, who don’t care about them.”
Managers/ bosses don’t often tell it like it is, admits Jack. He lists eight rules managers have to follow to be good leaders.
1. Relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach and build self-confidence
2. Make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it
3. Get into everyone’s skin, exuding positive energy and optimism
4. Establish trust with candour, transparency and credit
5. Have the courage to make unpopular decisions and gut calls
6. Probe and push with curiosity that borders on scepticism, making sure that action follows orders
7. Inspire risk taking and learning by setting examples
8. Celebrate ... it creates an atmosphere of recognition and positive energy
But Jack ropes in the managers and the managed in his criticism against not sharing enough with the rest of the crew: “Lack of candour is the biggest dirty little secret in business ... it’s a killer when people don’t open up, are not frank and prefer to keep things to themselves ... they like to hoard information.”
At GE, Jack encouraged employees to speak up, to be candid. But what if one is working at a place where they say, ‘Let me tell you, if I say one word, I’m gonna get whacked.’ What do you do then?
“That’s a tough situation ... one of the reasons I wrote this book is to get people to realize the value of candour, we have to get that candour into the workplace. If people can save so much time [by being honest] ... they can become so much more competitive. Everything works faster and smoother. People are open, upfront. The team rallies around it.”
Having spent 40 years in the “be-the-best-style”, Winning talks to line workers and MBAs at the same time, highlighting energy, curiosity, guts, ambition and values for all as the cutting edge of success, in any business — big or small.
Bill Gates, in Jack’s praise, says that the book is written in Jack’s distinctive no b.s. voice, it offers deep insights, original thinking and solutions to nuts-and-bolts problems we daily face.
When you hire, perform the three acid tests before signing the contract and those according to this ‘bible of business’ are: Integrity, intelligence and maturity of the person applying for the job. Engage the potential hires to tell their stories ...
“Probe, dig and question”, advises Jack, saying that the best way to complement the three is to question hard the interviewee: why he left his last job and the job before that. “Was it due to the environment, the boss or the team?”
Once the interviewer is sure that the acid test has been met, he can then proceed with Jack’s 4-Es and 1- P. “Is the energy level high? Does he/she have the ability to energize others? Does he/she have the edge to make a decision when needed? How well does he/she execute under pressure?
The 1-P in Jack’s book is “passion”.
Hiring criteria for managers are different. “Real change agents comprise less than 10 per cent of all business people. They have courage — a certain fearlessness about the unknown and an understanding of their competition where when it comes to strategy, they ponder less and do more.”
Define a boss?
A boss, says Jack, is he, who has ‘authenticity’; ‘sees around corners’, ‘surrounds himself with better and smarter people’; and displays ‘heavy-duty resilience’.
Jack’s advice: “Spend plenty up front and put the best, hungriest and most passionate people in leadership roles.”
But beware of hyper-ambitious types whose career lust shows itself in tearing down others, insulting or disparaging them in order to make their candle burn brightly.
GE stock made Jack a very rich man. He has minted millions. And now that he’s retired, he has more time to spend that money.
What does he like doing?
“You know, I never had a lot of things, so I’m a bit nouveau riche in terms of going to a hotel. I like great hotels, great sheets, I mean, silly little things. I don’t like boats. I don’t like buying airplanes, boats. I have no toys.”
Jack and Suzy’s search for the big ‘Aha’ is however on.
“This is the way to win,” he says. “Is it a new machine? Is it a faster machine? What’s the big thing that gives you the edge in any product, or any service? that’s what you search for ... More ‘Aha.’”
That’s Jack’s story. For next week, I have lined up interviews of people who tell a different tale of how corporate America has left them behind — making them invisible, irrelevant and tangential.
A boss is a person who sees around corners, surrounds himself with smart people and displays resilience. Is it so? 
