Jack Welch
John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr. ( born November 19, 1935 in Peabody, Massachusetts) was from April 1981 to September 2001 CEO of General Electric.
Welch was born in 1935 as the only child of a railroad train conductor and a housewife in the small town of Peabody. With its policy of repairing, selling or closing ( " fix it, sell it or close it" ) of loss-making assets and the Zukaufens promising technologies he made the U.S. conglomerate General Electric ( GE) into a profitable and growing company. Meanwhile, Welch retired.
The personal assets of Jack Welch is estimated at 720 million U.S. dollars (as of 2006). He is since 2001 in his third marriage with 24 years younger than Suzy Welch, former editor of the Harvard Business Review, married.
Career
Jack Welch first attended the State University of Massachusetts and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. The trained chemical engineer who had been working since 1960 in various positions at General Electric, came in 1981 at the top of the easy to fishtail geratenen company and led it as CEO until 6 September 2001.
Welch boosted sales of General Electric of 27 billion U.S. dollars in 1981 to 130 billion U.S. dollars in 2001, the annual profit sevenfold to about 12.7 billion U.S. dollars; same time, the number of worldwide employees of 400,000 reduced to 300,000.
In his pension contract Welch had allowed himself to assure in addition to an annual payment of nine million dollars the free use of a company aircraft, a VIP box at the baseball games of the Boston Red Sox, an apartment in the Trump Tower and free dining in a fancy restaurant; after criticism he renounced these perks.
Welch was named in 1999 by the business magazine "Fortune" "Manager of the Century". It is also true in Germany as one of the most influential thought leaders and co-founder of the shareholder value focus.
In 2009 was founded by a donation Welch, the Jack Welch Management Institute at the University of Ohio. The Institute offers a work based on Welch's management philosophy MBA program that can be completed via the Internet and distance learning.
Management methods
Core of his management approach was the rule " fix, close or sell " ( German: repair, close or sell ). Thereafter, a part of the company, does not meet the growth and return goals or has operational deficits, closed or sold, if the problems can not be solved within two years.
In the " Work-Out " program he trained in the company's training center in Crotonville, New York each year 8,000 executives and led a regular meeting of the manager with the staff.
In 1996, he directed General Electric Six Sigma as a method for quality control. The aim of this from Motorola method is that no more than 3.4 defects per one million opportunities to be approved in a single step, so after going through all process steps to settle the final quality of the products adequately high. Welch even changed the bonus system and made the payment to 40% on the achievement of Six Sigma targets.
Welch is also considered one of the fathers of the shareholder value concept, to be aligned with the business decisions solely on the benefit to shareholders. As the birth of the movement is considered a speech to take over the leadership of General Electric, which he held in a New York hotel in 1981. Then he led GE for more than two decades and contributed with his successes during this time much to the fact that the shareholder value idea has become dominant.
In March 2009 (FTD of 13 March 2009), he turned away from this concept and said that his earlier conviction was in this respect a " stupid idea ". It is wrong that managers and investors fixed the steady earnings growth and constant share price increases as an outstanding destination. " Strictly speaking, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world of shareholder value is a result, not a strategy; . Most important stakeholders are our own staff, its own customers and its products. " This advanced approach is the now familiar model of a Balanced Scorecard.
Jack Welch is one of the most successful managers and management thinkers in the U.S., but also as one of the most controversial. His radical methods have the nickname Neutron Jack introduced him to the buildings and machines remain as an allusion to the operation of a neutron bomb, in which the people will be wiped out, but get.
Stars and Lemons
The team fielded by Welch " 20-70-10 " rule states that in a company the best 20% of staff ( "Stars " ) with bonuses rewarded, the required 70 % in the center as possible and encouraged, the weakest 10% ( " Lemons " ) should be dismissed against it. While the principle was practiced at General Electric in the United States have long consistently, there is at the German branch no such percentage requirements, as cultural differences and the German labor prevented this so far.
Swell
Works
- Jack Welch, WHAT COUNTS, The autobiography of the best manager in the world, ISBN 3-548-36398-9, Ullstein
- Jack Welch, Winning - It's management, 2005, ISBN 3-593-37767-5, Campus -Verlag