Jack Welch & The G.E. Way: Management Insights and Leadership Secrets of the Legendary CEO

In this book, Slater draws extensively on Welch's own words to deliver his now familiar message: keep it simple; face reality; embrace change; fight bureaucracy. Bromides these may be, but Slater's account of Welch's fierce efforts to lead a global, multifarious organization of 270,000 people does inspire admiration, even if it does not enable emulation. The book provides fresh insights into GE's shift toward service businesses, as with its takeover and transformation of NBC. Most timely are Welch's closing thoughts on trends in the global economy. Jack Welch and the GE Way is a must for the legions of "Welch-heads" out there and for anyone else interested in this brilliant leader's perspective on the future of business. --Barry Mitzman

Product Description
Behind the scenes with the legendary CEO

Jack Welch’s innovative leadership strategies revived a lagging GE, transforming it into a powerhouse with a staggering $300 billion-plus market capitalization. In writing Jack Welch and the GE Way, author Robert Slater was given unprecedented access to Welch and other prominent GE insiders. What emerged is a brilliant portrait that tells you what makes Jack Welch tick. Learn how to work the Welch magic on your own company as you find out how he dismantled the boundaries between management layers, between engineers and marketers, between GE and its customers to streamline the process of getting products and services to market.

Get details on Welch’s far-reaching Six Sigma quality initiative, and discover how its principles and standards can save billions of dollars...how and why he has made GE a truly global company (and why you must think global as well)...and all the other Welch "midas touch" strategies you can put to work in your organization, at every level!

However, as a book goes, it would appear the author was paid by the word. Each of the "secrets" is presented, reviewed, repeated, and presented again in a 300+ page book that would better be summarized in about 20. I kept reading after the first two chapters thinking I would learn somthing new, but honestly, save your money, read chapter one at the library, and go home with just as much insight.

To the publisher, I'd recommed an "executive summary" version for the next edition.


Obsolete   February 20, 2003
 13 out of 13 found this review helpful

This book has some nuggets but you do have to overcome some meandering. The author jumps from format to format sometimes turning the book into a Jack Welch biography and at other times acting as if the book were a serious business analysis of GE and the changes Welch brought. It fails as a biography and the business analysis is lightweight at best. It's not clear what this book is trying to deliver but what I got out of it were a cursory understanding of the challenges that GE faced and some sense of why Jack Welch succeeded. Now that Jack Welch is retired and has an autobiography "Straight from the Gut" this book is almost obsolete.


Fools Gold   March 22, 2002
 5 out of 17 found this review helpful

Applying some of the concepts of Mr. Welch's philosophy helped to facilitate operational improvement in my team that earned a distinguished company award. I was so enthralled that I purchased a GE fridge, and convinced my in-laws to do the same even though another brand of fridge lasted tham almost 30 years. Less than 5 years and thousands of dollars later, neither GE fridge is operational. The GE Way -- admire the brilliance, but stay away from the products.