Jack Welch

Jack Welch

Talking about the most famous and competitive business enterprises in the world, we can never omit GE, and talking about the success of GE, we always have to mention its leader, Jack Welch. Welch has been the leader who embraced change all the time and who helped GE make an outstanding turnaround when it was going down. He joined GE in 1960 and became the youngest General Manager of GE in 1968. In 1980, Welch was announced to be the eighth CEO of GE, and started to implement all his leadership ideas into the company. During his 20 years of work at the CEO level, he has made a complete revolution to every aspect of GE’s origin. GE has shifted from a highly bureaucratic corporation to a highly productive machine with high speed of production and no complexity of hierarchy. Jack Welch’s successful leadership style includes several aspects, which are as follows.

First and foremost, Jack Welch has always been able to seizing the initiatives to make changes, which resulted in revolutionary progress of the entire corporation. The study of leadership is the study of how men and women guide others through adversity, uncertainty, hardships, disruption, transformation, transition, recovery, new beginnings, and other significant challenges. When Welch took over the CEO position, GE was already one of the strongest companies, and he aimed to make the company to be either first or second in the industry. He did a series of things that no leaders in the business world had ever done before. He used a “fix, close or sell” strategy to get rid of unproductive segments of the business and to focus on solid and profitable parts of GE. Then he successfully cut down GE’s bureaucracy by downsizing, and achieved a clean, simply and effective arrangement of human resources. In addition, he eliminated the boundaries in the corporation and made every employee have his or her own voice, thus made GE an open, informal and boundaryless company where employees felt free to move...