Jack Welch: The Buddha of Business
The GE maestro was the “Buddha” of business because he would take the underpinnings of organizational success and turn them into a mantra.
Published in
3 min readFeb 22, 2021
- Managers Muddle: The definition of leadership is to excite through an inspiring vision rather than enervate, depress, and control. Control, supervision, and bureaucracy kill the competitive spirit. “Weak managers are business killers, job killers. You can’t manage self-confidence into people, but you will be amazed by how much people do when they are not told what to do.”
- Leaders Simplify: Instead of KISS (keep it simple stupid), I believe in INSIST (if it’s not simple, it’s stupid). Have the courage to be as simple as Abraham Lincoln (“You can fool some of the people all of the time”). Get your point across vividly and memorably.
- Forget Formality: Get rid of the chief executive, the gals, the employees, and the protocols. Replace with the team leader, female team members, my coworkers, the culture.” Corporate informality encourages a team to challenge the boss’s pet ideas comfortably.” It means bad ideas don’t surface until after it’s too late.
- Markets Don’t Lie: Find the reality, face it, and act. It means saying things that may be hard to hear, unpopular, but your world improves when you take them in hand, and you have the freedom to think creatively.
- Change Is Beautiful: Keeping an eye out for change is both exhilarating and fun. “Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion.”
- Ideas From Nowhere: If you limit input, you limit output. “The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea, and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action ‒ fast.”
- Follow Up Is Fantastic: If a decision is difficult, follow-up gives you a chance to reconsider. If it isn’t working, follow-up prevents wasting resources. It is the quickest way to results in business.
- Bid The Bureaucrat Bye: Let people loose and get management off their backs, the functional barriers out of their way, and the bureaucratic shackles off their feet. If a manager is not doing this, the next step should be simple.
- Boundarylessness: “Boundarylessness” describes an open organization free of bureaucracy and anything else that prevents the free flow of ideas, people, decisions, etc. Informality, fun, and speed are the qualities found in a boundaryless organization.
- Cultures Learn: Create a learning culture. “The desire, and the ability, of an organization to continuously learn from any source, anywhere — and to rapidly convert this learning into action — is its ultimate competitive advantage.” “You have just got to focus on innovation constantly. You’ve got to produce more for less through intellectual capital. Shun the incremental and look for quanta leaps.
- Stretch To The Sky: “We have found that by reaching for what appears to be the impossible, we often actually do the impossible; and even when we don’t quite make it, we inevitably wind up doing much better than we would have done.”
- Inspire Confidence: “Just as surely as speed flows from simplicity, simplicity is grounded in self-confidence.” This will activate learning, creativity, and imagination. No child ever comes home with a drawing who lacked self-confidence.
- Fun is Fundamental: If you don’t enjoy your work, you can’t engage the team. If they’re not having fun, they won’t be committed to the goals of the company. Fun isn’t a ‘thing’ we do in our spare time. It is a value of the business.
- Be Number 1 or Number 2: “If you’re number four in a market when number one sneezes, you get pneumonia. When you’re number one, you control your destiny. The number fours keep merging; they have difficult times. If you’re number four, you have to find strategic ways to get stronger. ”
- Think Smaller: Small companies are uncluttered, simple, informal. They thrive on passion and ridicule bureaucracy. Small companies grow on good ideas — regardless of their source. They need everyone, involve everyone, and reward or remove people based on their contribution to winning. Small companies dream big dreams and set the bar high ‒ increments and fractions don’t interest them.”
