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Jack Welch has died

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Re: Jack Welch has died

#61

Post by losthobbies »

hugi wrote: post #47
alehul wrote: post #31

Given that every single comment I've seen so far is a joke or a negative, it's worth offering a more respectful perspective of his accomplishments and story from Wikipedia [1]: Jack Welch was the child of a railroad conductor, born and raised outside Boston. He worked as a golf caddie, newspaper delivery boy, shoe salesman, and drill press operator, throughout middle school and high school. Welch joined GE in 1960 as…

They always make you sound nice in the obituary.

"Sure, there are only saints in the graveyard"

Re: Jack Welch has died

#62

Post by hylaride »

throwaway55554 wrote: post #57
Ididntdothis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ballmer actually left a better company than Welch.

Because of policies like this or in spite of them?

Both. I've posted this before about Ballmer, but I'll repost:

He consistently increased earnings via Windows and Office during his tenure as CEO. He was a very good businessman.

He was not, however, a product guy. Witness their failures with the Zune, mobile, search, and early cloud computing. His problem was that he always tried to do what would be best for Microsoft first and not the customer. You can get away with this if you already have an entrenched install base (windows/office), but with net new products people will look at what's best for them first. Even with developers developers developers he tried too hard to get people to use pure MS tech and made developing for the web on MS ugly if you are using anything other than .NET. He didn't see the geeks learning to program in their basement or dorm rooms who ended up using free software instead of going through any "free" channels that may have been available to them (were they?). The result is a generation of developers on Macs and to a lesser extent linux. MS is only now catering to them.

Funny enough, thinking of the customer is what MS did with the xbox and it worked out well enough.

Re: Jack Welch has died

#63

Post by technofiend »

dralley wrote: post #15
dayofthedaleks wrote: post #4

My impression is that he was no management genius but rather fortunate in the timing of moving his company into the FIRE sector. All of that goodwill evaporated in the 09 crisis. Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions? I guess he also deserves the credit/blame for the ubiquity of Six Sigma.

> 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 a manager who spent his year compiling a list of mistakes by other teams. When it came to year end reviews anyone asking about the ranking of this manager's people ended up deflected with questions about their own team members. People learned to just leave this manager's rankings alone and work around him. He was wildly successful, getting promoted early and often before leaving the company to go start a recruiting firm which allegedly applies some sort of AI principles to picking good candidates.

Re: Jack Welch has died

#64

Post by hylaride »

abraxas wrote: post #44
soapboxrocket wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. And if you pull if forward, stack ranking did a lot of damage to both GE and Microsoft after Ballmer implemented it. The real failure of stack ranking is it never ends, so at some point you are firing good employees.

Also the list of "good" employees is not consistent year to year. Even if you don't fire people most will have better and worse years. Sometimes the swings can be dramatic when people find their groove or conversely when they face burnout or have personal problems. Stack ranking is stupid, heartless and unscientific. Just like the man who invented it.

It in fact gets worse. During stack ranking's tenure at Microsoft, they would often pull the "best and brightest" in the entire company into teams to accomplish certain goals. The theoretical "best and brightest" were then stack-ranked against each other. Every manager had to pick the "worst" person to eventually get canned.

Re: Jack Welch has died

#65

Post by buran77 »

tyre wrote: post #54
Ididntdothis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“he gave himself an A for his execution of its operations, and an F for his choice of successor.” That alone disqualifies him as a leader “I did everything right but others screwed it up”.

What story does the evidence tell you? If you're going to disqualify someone as a leader, Jack Welch is not that guy.

He's the type of leader who grew the company on a minefield of figurative debt and real hidden costs. Leaving behind something with a solid foundation makes you a good leader. Getting out in time from a Ponzi scheme you built doesn't.

Another trait of a real leader is to be able to grow another leader who can do the same. By his own statements he failed.

Re: Jack Welch has died

#67

Post by Ididntdothis »

buran77 wrote: post #65
tyre wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What story does the evidence tell you? If you're going to disqualify someone as a leader, Jack Welch is not that guy.

He's the type of leader who grew the company on a minefield of figurative debt and real hidden costs. Leaving behind something with a solid foundation makes you a good leader. Getting out in time from a Ponzi scheme you built doesn't. Another trait of a real leader is to be able to grow another leader who can do the same. By his own statements he failed.

And you don’t complain publicly about the people you hired. Especially while loudly proclaiming how good you are at hiring.

Re: Jack Welch has died

#69

Post by reaperducer »

melvinram wrote: post #38
dayofthedaleks wrote: post #4

My impression is that he was no management genius but rather fortunate in the timing of moving his company into the FIRE sector. All of that goodwill evaporated in the 09 crisis. Can someone speak to his lasting major contributions? I guess he also deserves the credit/blame for the ubiquity of Six Sigma.

Pardon my ignorance on the topic, but why would moving a business into new areas be considered lucky? I wouldn't consider Apple moving into phones as lucky. Would you?

If you saw Apple moving into phones and then moved your business into phones and your business did well, a person like Welch would call himself lucky.

Re: Jack Welch has died

#70

Post by salawat »

programbreeding wrote: post #42
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #29

The article has a good summary of his legacy and his gracefulness: Under Mr. Welch, GE became known for consistent profit performance and a surging stock price. Much of those gains came from GE Capital, the finance arm that ballooned under Mr. Welch and would almost destroy the company during the 2008 financial crisis. GE’s profit has plunged in recent years, dragged down by hidden costs in the company’s Capital unit…

>Much of those gains came from GE Capital >GE’s profit has plunged in recent years, dragged down by hidden costs in the company’s Capital unit >he gave himself an A for his execution of its operations, and an F for his choice of successor Am I reading it right that the reason GE Capital was so successful during his time was because there were hidden costs, making it appear more profitable than it was, that didn't com…

Yes. You are reading it right.

The best way to describe the management style of the 80's onward would be a financially engineered pump-and-dump characterized by putting workers through the meat grinder, and shirking any social responsibility that could be conceivably avoided by any means possible. Those are the basis of the hidden costs. Each person that got sacked took more institutional knowledge with them, and each responsibility shirked was just a matter of time before it came back around to bite the company on the balance sheets.

Once 2008 hit, seeing as most of the value the Capital part of the company had was found to be a house of cards, nearly taking the company out with it.

When the price of growth is to be an absolute bastard; one should wonder whether the price is too high. Note also that Reich's management style basically required the Reagan era deregulation to thrive. He was far more reserved when Unions actually had teeth.

Really a shining example of what not to emulate in my book. If you have to sacrifice long-term stability for short-term growth, you're misreading the landscape.

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