Of socks and men

An interesting book! JW ran GE with great success and has written down the things that he thought crucial.
A lot of it lines up with Porter’s ideas on separating yourself from competition by picking your own spot. Welch avoided taking on the Japanese at their own game by exiting businesses where they seemed to be winning. Sun Tzu’s strategy masterpiece Art of War has similar advice, on fighting downhill and avoiding annihilation whenever possible, and predates Jack by a couple of millennia.
He advises continuous improvement (see Kaizen) to keep ahead and lays a huge emphasis on getting the people right. Getting hold of the right people, and getting rid of the wrong people, comes up again and again. Training and development are portrayed as key motivational tools that people appreciate. A motivated and skilled workforce differentiated his businesses from his competitors.
I don’t agree with his distinction between the business world producing wealth and the public sector as overhead. His companies wouldn’t do so well without public services schooling his workers, taking care of their health and preserving the peace in which his companies can operate. The public services are part of the value chain and deserve more respect than he admits.
With the candor that he advocates from the start, he reveals that his career outweighed his family life. Partly he puts this down to the era and his background. He discusses work-life balance and declares it to be a personal choice. With the benefit of experiencing some of the consequences of that era we can now make different choices and try to recognise when we have the balance wrong and when we are encouraging others to make iniquitous choices.
He doesn’t claim that his is a unique formula for success and is very clear about the merit of doing rather than analysing.