Jack Welch: A business giant by any definition
There are corporate titans — and then there is Jack Welch, who led General Electric through an extraordinary expansion as its totemic chief executive in the go-go days of the 1980s and ‘90s.
Fortune magazine named him Manager of the Century and considering that the market capitalisation of the firm went from $13bn (£10.2bn) to north of $400bn in the time he was in the top job, that seems a fair enough title to bestow.
He was the poster boy for the heady days of Reaganomics and corporate America’s extraordinary growth, yet despite occasional controversy, never crossed the line into Gordon Gekko territory.
Welch grew up in humble if not hardscrabble circumstances, the first of his family to go to university. Finding academia humdrum, he went into the business world as an engineer for GE in 1960 — and never looked back. He took the top job in 1981 at the age of just 45.
His business style delivered value for shareholders beyond their wildest dreams, though he said that was never an end in itself; that was merely the result of bright business strategy. He was renowned for his combative management style, even going so far as to use what became nicknamed the “rank and yank” style of management — in which the worst-performing members of his management teams were simply fired.
It’s safe to say that not all of his methods are popular with management gurus and authors in today’s more compassionate world, but his books still sell like hot cakes. But for all the caricatures of “Neutron Jack,” he got far more right than he ever got wrong. He saw the threat from Japanese companies whilst the rest of corporate America was asleep at the wheel.
He saw the possibilities for large outfits like GE to get into the financial game. He recognised too the value of cutting one’s losses when a particular initiative wasn’t working out. And rather than indecision, he lived by the mantra that “if we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by.”
There have been innumerable opinions on Welch and the company he left behind at the turn of the millennium, not least when its market dalliances resulted in an extraordinary bail-out at the height of the financial crisis.
Those opinions will no doubt be re-hashed in the days to come. One thing is for sure, though. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.
Main image: Getty