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Jack Welch has died

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Re: Jack Welch has died

#131

Post by rhizome »

technofiend wrote: post #63
dralley wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions? Inflicting "stack ranking" upon the world, for one. Not all contributions are positive.

In my humble opinion stack ranking was meant to create a clear process by which to measure people relative to their roles and each other. (I'm not defending the practice, just stating purpose.) Instead it created selective pressure that measured how well you could game the process to appear successful and push down the ranking of everyone else for yourself and your employees. During the stack ranking heyday there was…

Yes, the purpose was to measure the unmeasurable, which, since it's impossible by definition, created the secondary effects you describe.

For details on the daily workings of stack ranking at Microsoft, the venerated Mini Microsoft is still up and available in all it's 15 year old glory. It's one of the true documents of contemporary tech work, and I'm glad it isn't just buried in archive.org (long live archive.org).

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/

Go back to the first couple years and you'll be soaking in it.

Re: Jack Welch has died

#132

Post by DrScientist »

bena wrote: post #77
mytailorisrich wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never liked or understood the popularity (at least for a time) of the 'vitality curve'. Indeed, if you think that 10% of your employees must be fired every year then, to me, it is a sign that something is horribly wrong and you should really focus on that, not to mention the horrible effect this practice has on company culture and atmosphere.

I think the core idea makes sense, at least intuitively. Remove the worst performers. Make room for better people. The issue is that you will always have "worst performers". There needs to be a minimally acceptable performance level. And you also need enough slack so that the churn isn't affecting overall performance.

And the constant fear of being in the bottom 10% doesn't create destructive behaviours like credit stealing, passing on failures dressed up as successes, and actively sabotaging competing projects or people.

ie you risk ending up with an internal hunger games when in reality you should all be working together against the external opposition.

If you want to get rid of the 'dead wood' then there are much better ways that don't create such negative effects on both the company and the people.

A smarter way to do this, is to have a probationary period on initial recruitment to check either of you haven't made a mistake, and the occasional reorg to which gives the opportunity for managers to remove consistently poor performers over a longer time period - ideally into a better suited role in the same org.

Finally, if his method worked, you'd expect the distribution of performance to narrow over time to the point where you reach steady state where who is in the bottom 10% is essentially random noise on a tight distribution.

Assuming he wasn't that dim, then he could of only intentionally created it to create a climate of fear because he believed that was the best way to motivate people.

It's certainly the easiest.

Re: Jack Welch has died

#133

Post by dnautics »

neves wrote: post #125
asveikau wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, at some point in American business culture it does seem like a number of people did lose sight and become convinced that the only way to deliver shareholder value is to lay off continuously.

It looks like this became the basis of American economy. And you can't loose your job, because you'll miss your mortgage or education payments and loose your health care. So you must do anything your employer tell you to do.

I would say it's become the basis of worldwide modern central banking capitalism, gas and water socialist countries included.

Re: Jack Welch has died

#134

Post by triceratops »

projektfu wrote: post #115
shekharshan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They called him “neutron Jack” for that very reason.

That was more because of his restructuring in the early 90s. "As with a neutron bomb, the buildings are still standing but the people are gone." He didn't seem to understand GE's broad products businesses but did understand finance, so he continuously closed those operations.

> He didn't seem to understand GE's broad products businesses but did understand finance, so he continuously closed those operations.

Uh...no. He was a trained chemical engineer, and understood products, manufacturing, and operations perfectly well.

In his own words, here's why he emphasized finance:

"My gut told me that compared to the industrial operations I did know, this business [GE Capital] seemed an easy way to make money. You didn't have to invest heavily in R&D, build factories, and bend metal day after day. You didn't have to build scale to be competitive. The business was all about intellectual capital - finding smart and creative people and then using GE's strong balance sheet. This thing looked like a 'gold mine' to me." (emphasis mine)

Re: Jack Welch has died

#135

Post by mo1ok »

devonkim wrote: post #102
IOT_Apprentice wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they pushed outsourcing hard under his reign. They were one of the companies responsible for destroying a lot of IT jobs in the US as a result. Not a good guy at all.

Every other F100 was outsourcing IT like crazy in the mid-2000s because of that Harvard Business Review article that talked about outsourcing everything non-essential to your primary business. Meanwhile, Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) thought that was a stupid idea because every business was being transformed by its IT and that it's a revenue multiplier, not a cost center (something that every other decent person in the…

I recently got a subscription to the HBR and am surprised at how...misguided it is. It's shocking how this locus of low competency is destroying American business. Ditto on the outsourcing, too - left a job at a blue-chip American company because its culture had been internally rotted by outsourcing. (Of course, they were hilariously struggling to keep and retain the talent necessary to stay ahead of the tech curve, now institutionally recognizing they've made a massive mistake. Most good engineers had a tenure of 6 months.)

Re: Jack Welch has died

#136

Post by reggieband »

My only memory of Jack Welch was a PBS interview I caught a slice of where he was asked what his number one piece of advice for management was. He said that a CEO's job was to create and promote culture.

I can see a lot of negativity for the man in the comments here but I agree with him on the culture issue. I can understand the negative feeling people get with some of Welch's personal cultural choices. However, it does seem he was successful at articulating a culture and bringing in a team that believed in that culture.

I think it is wise to try to learn from people even when you dislike them, maybe especially when you dislike them. Even if you don't like what he did, you can change your view to respect how he did it.

Re: Jack Welch has died

#137

Post by gumby »

Welch was destructive for GE and the cult of his approach has been destructive for the industrial sector.

He turned around GE for the short term, but undermined the fundamental model of a conglomerate (there are good arguments for and against conglomerates, but GE was an is one). The metrics used were ultimately all short term ones and allowed the business to become lopsided, a disaster from which it has still not recovered.

The analogy of "cutting the fat" (nicely timed for the era of the Jane Fonda workout)* was stupid. Actual healthy humans have body fat in the teens, with a few elite athletes (who do nothing but train) at the very low end. Instead the mantra was to consider anything not immediately useful -- drive the "body fat" to 0%.

It's like a community madness, and it spread to corporate America and to some extent governments as well which has resulted in the current parlous state of the economy: a Potemkin economy that looks great only because the metrics used all face the "painted side".

Good riddance to this blood sucker.

* no insult intended for the Jane Fonda Workout

Re: Jack Welch has died

#138

Post by martin1975 »

optimiz3 wrote: post #34

Steve Ballmer revered Jack Welch's rank-and-yank management style. During the 2000s and early 2010s Microsoft's stack-rank reviews were infamous for the internal politics created. Didn't matter if you had a full team of top-tier engineers, the bottom 15% WAS going to get managed out. Savvy managers would hire low-tier performers to protect the productive ones. That's the only lens through which I have to view Mr. Wel…

The problem with performance reviews is that they are mostly subjective instead of mostly objective. I've yet to see a company specify a clear objective criteria for advancement.

Re: Jack Welch has died

#139

Post by [deleted] »

codazoda wrote: post #108
brandonmenc wrote: post #24

My father worked his way up from the foundry to "Business Leader" (management) at GE, starting in the mid 1970s. GE was a mess internally, all the way down to the shop floor, before Welch took over. His impact cannot be understated. We were big Jack Welch fans - if he hadn't grown GE the way he did, my hometown - where it was the largest employer for decades - would have been a lot poorer.

I had the amazing opportunity to sit through a training where Jack Welch came to our company and taught a dozen of us his simple time management system. This was back in 1996 and I’ve been using some of the idea’s he gave us ever since. His philosophy about focusing on creating leaders seemed solid. His philosophy on rank-and-yank cost him a lot of fans.

[deleted]

Re: Jack Welch has died

#140

Post by exclusiv »

gumby wrote: post #137

Welch was destructive for GE and the cult of his approach has been destructive for the industrial sector. He turned around GE for the short term, but undermined the fundamental model of a conglomerate (there are good arguments for and against conglomerates, but GE was an is one). The metrics used were ultimately all short term ones and allowed the business to become lopsided, a disaster from which it has still not re…

> Good riddance to this blood sucker.

Really? You don't agree with his corporate style / strategy / books and that justifies saying something like that?

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