My Book Review

My Book Review

By: Sumaiya Khan

Catalogue Card / Author’s Bio / Summary / Table Of Contents / My Review

Catalogue Card

ISBN / 0789471590
Title / Jack Welch (Business Masterminds)
Author / Robert Heller
Publisher / DK ADULT
Year / March 5, 2001
# of Pages / 107

Author’s Bio

Robert Heller is himself a prolific author of management books. The first, The Naked Manager, published in 1972, established Heller as an iconoclastic, wide-ranging guide to managerial excellence -- and incompetence. Heller has drawn on the extensive knowledge of managers and management that he acquired as the founding editor of Management Today, Britain's premier business magazine, which he headed for 25 years. Books such as The Super managers and In Search of European Excellence address the ways in which the latest ideas on change, quality, and motivation are providing new routes to business success. In 1990 Heller wrote Culture Shock, one of the first books to describe how IT would revolutionize management. Since then, as writer, lecturer, and consultant, Heller has continued to tell managers how to "Ride the Revolution," the title of his 2000 book, written with Paul Spenley. His books for Dorling Kindersley's Essential Managers series are international bestsellers.

Book Summary

CEO of General Electric for 30 years, Jack Welch was declared the greatest manager of the 20th century. Focusing firmly on results, he revolutionized management to achieve phenomenal growth for his company. In this inspiring volume, Robert Heller analyzes Jack Welch's core management strategies and presents a series of master classes that show how to put the business guru's theories into practice. Discover how Welch: eliminates bureaucracy and breaks down boundaries, mobilizes and motivates his workforce, exploits and embraces change, establishes a new company culture, and sets stretch targets for himself and others. Supplying lessons from todays most celebrated and successful business thinkers, the Business Masterminds series is perfect for people hoping to advance their careers, make their own businesses grow and prosper, or achieve personal goals. In addition to providing overviews of each leader's most influential writings and speeches, each title is packed with full-color charts, diagrams, and photographs that graphically illustrate complex concepts.
Catalogue Card / Author’s Bio / Summary / Table Of Contents / My Review

Table of Contents

# / Chapter Title / Pg #
1 / Making Managers Lead / 12
2 / Mobilizing the Workforce / 36
3 / Winning Competitive Advantage / 52
4 / Pursuing Shareholder Value / 74
5 / Exploiting the Forces of Change / 88
TOC / Chapter 1 Summary Making managers lead
This chapter starts by describing us the three main things that are at the core of Jack Welch’s preaching and practice. These include the distinction between leaders and managers, and the driving necessity to transform the latter into the former. His seven-point program for management includes: develop a vision for the business, change the culture to achieve the vision, flatten the organization, eliminate bureaucracy, empower individuals, raise quality and eliminate boundaries. The way Welch sees it the difference between leader and a manager is that between a general and an officer down the line.
When it came to controlling bureaucracy Welch believed in minimalist form. He showed that the systems beloved by bureaucrats can be turned into dynamic forces. As an example, he would use meetings and committees, not as controls, but as his most powerful management tool. Pursuing best practice was essential for Mr. Welch. Power of delegation was what Welch’s leadership theory depended on. He leads by having goals for all important measures- productivity, inventory turns, quality, working capital, customer satisfaction. Jack Welch had a special recipe, which had four parts to it, for winning the middle managers hearts and minds and of course their effort: free managers to manage and to rise, defeat bureaucracy and rigidity, generate and use new ideas, empower workers to flourish and grows.
TOC / Chapter 2 Summary Mobilizing the Workforce
For Mobilizing the workforce Welch believed that 11- main things should be maintained well: cutting out corporate fat, improving employee value, banishing traditional bosses, studying GE practices, handling executives, cultural revolution, working with work-outs, from trivial to fundamental, extending work-out benefits, exchanging practices and Unifying to achieve quality. This chapter explains about the heart operation Welch had and was absent for the time period when Six Sigma came to GE.
TOC / Chapter 3 Summary Winning Competitive Advantage
Jack Welch is a fierce believer in competition, but only in competition that he can win. He sees no advantage in fighting what are doomed to be loosing battles. His drive toliberate and empower the workforce is therefore not enlightened management for enlightens sake.
TOC / Chapter 4 Summary Pursuing Shareholder Value
Welch was moving fast towards his goal of making GE the richest corporation, but that by no means satisfied him. He believed that cutbacks do not create shareholder value: they reverse its waste, but creation requires positive strategies. He acted in the 1080’s on concepts that were to be articulated by thinkers in the next decade.
TOC / Chapter 5 Summary Exploiting the Forces of Change
Jack Welch’s entire career at the summit of General Electric is testimony to a truth in which he strongly believes. He has never hesitated to express the truth as he sees it. Change (the biggest challenge, according the Welch) is always easier to propose than to achieve, even for an exceptionally vigorous manager. He was even accused of going too far, too fast. The final theme of Welch’s reign, a preoccupation that grew more and more insistent over the 1990s, was a big idea.
Catalogue Card / Author’s Bio / Summary / Table Of Contents / My Review

My Review

Mr. Welch's great strength is that he is open to and hungry for new ideas. A modest weakness of this book is that it doesn't say enough about how the later ideas sometimes contradict the earlier ideas. The concepts of Six Sigma were well known early in his tenure as CEO.
The book is organized around the following principles: Turning managers into leaders, using everyone's thinking in the enterprise, moving ahead faster than competitors in meaningful ways, expanding stock price more rapidly than earnings, using new trends the influences to your advantage.
The bibliography presented at the end of the book should be used if one wants to go deeper in some points presented slightly in the book