Global Leadership Summit 2010 Day 2:Jack Welch

From the conference notes:

Said to be the most studied CEO of the 20th Century, Jack Welch began his 41-year career with General Electric Company in 1960, and in 1981 became the company's eighth chairman and CEO.

Fortune named him "manager of the century", and the Financial Times named him one of the three most admired business leaders in the world.

He teaches at MIT's Sloan School of Management and recently launched the Jack Welch Management Institute at Chancellor University, offering advanced management degrees online.

A prolific business writer, he authored the internationally best-selling autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut and most recently outlined his management philosophy in the best-seller Winning.

From my personal notes:

• Bill Hybels has been trying to get Jack Welch to speak for 15 years.
• According to Welch, leaders need to be comfortable in their own shoes – someone people can count on.
• People in business take on a persona that is not themselves – they think they have to behave a certain way.
• Leaders need to energize people – being energetic does not necessarily help.
• Energizing someone means to get them to "feel it" – "feel the vision" – leaders need to "feel the fire" themselves because it is hard to pass it off otherwise.
• Tell a story. Show people how their lives will change in some way. Get them excited because you like the journey.
• "Most meetings that are any good are not planned."
• Leaders get smarter by learning from those around them. Too many managers are afraid of hiring people smarter than themselves, so "they hire dopes" instead.
• Truth-telling leads to less meetings and bureaucracy.
• Welch came to believe that differentiating people based on performance will help the staff. People need to be actually treated differently depending on their performance.
• Welch differentiated people by categorizing them in groups: the "top 20%", the "vital 70%", and the "bottom 10%".
• "Don't sports teams treat players differently? Isn't winning good? Business is a game too."
• Candor needs to be the foundation before differentiation happens.
• People need to know where they stand – it is hard to work for someone when they do not know where they stand.
• Most organizations spend too much time improving the bottom 10%. If you have an appraisal system with candor, where they stand should not come as a surprise to them at the time of review.
• "I love to see people grow" is a gene that good people possess.
• "Generosity of spirit" is a distinguishing characteristic of high performers.
• Bad leaders hide their top performers.
• Envy is a terrible thing that top leaders to not exhibit.
• A leader might run the risk of losing the top portion of the middle 70%, but one needs to remember that ranking is always based on a snapshot in time.
• Do not make up a new game every time it comes time for a review. One should hand-write what they said during the review, and when it comes time for the next review, use the same sheet as the original hand-written review so the individual can physically see what was said last time compared to now.
• A cynic is not a loud-mouthed disruptor.
• "The hallway whisper is deadly."
• "You have to do everything you can to stop the meeting after the meeting."
• "I can't think of a better way to build a team then by using 20-70-10."
• "Not recognizing performance is silly."
• "Sometimes non-profit is said to mean non-performance – that's a bunch of nonsense."
• Welch set up a succession process. He initially divided successor candidates into three categories that included "the obvious" and "the long-shots". Unexpectedly, only the long-shots survived over the years. It is difficult to determine how people will work over the long term.
• "Low-level managers have trouble celebrating little victories."
• This past year, Welch was in the hospital for 104 days. He got a staph infection from the cortizone shot he routinely gets in the back to play golf.
• When asked whether his spiritual journey changed while he was in the hospital, he said "maybe".