Secrets of Leadership Success: Prized moments with Jack Welch

“Get Better or Get Beaten!”
Robert Slater
McGraw-Hill (Updated Edition), 2001


Whether you agree or disagree with Jack Welch, chairman and CEO of General Electric – his ways, his grit, and his surprising moves – we can agree on one thing: He made such a huge success of GE.

For example: GE had annual revenues of $112 billion when it acquired Honeywell in the fall of 2000, adding yet $24 billion to sales. Its profits, at nearly $11 billion a year, grew by another $2.5 billion. As they say, “You cannot argue against success.”

So, whether you are a Jack Welch admirer or critic, you will find his thoughts useful. If you will not emulate him, you will prepare yourself to deal with a competitor using “Welchisms” against you. Since Welch can be your mentor or tormentor, you cannot ignore his book, “Get Better or Get Beaten.”

The book, subtitled “29 Leadership Secrets from GE’s Jack Welch,” is a distilled version of a book, also authored by Robert Slater, titled “Jack Welch and the GE Way.” But, whether you have read the thicker counterpart or not, this book will suffice to give you access to the valuable thoughts of a CEO who “has reinvented his company at every turn,” according to Slater.

Whenever you visit a bookstore, you encounter titles that promise you “immutable laws of marketing,” “irrefutable laws of leadership,” “unchangeable laws,”
“secrets of powerful speakers,” “100 unbreakable laws of business success,” etc. Question is: Why did the author decide to join the bandwagon and risked a simplistic (or oversimplified) presentation of Jack Welch’s decisions?

Slater’s answer: “I overheard one executive say that the GE books were interesting, but all were slow going. That comment stayed with me for days, until the idea for Get Better or Get Beaten! Hit me. What the market needs, I thought, was Jack Welch in a nutshell.”

You have two ways of reading the book. One, you go to your quiet corner and read every page from beginning to end, with a highlighter on hand. Two, you turn on the television for a B Movie, or watch a re-run of “American Beauty” – and you pick up nuggets of this great American CEO. I tried both approaches.

The first approach primed me to get the thought and background of Welch’s insights. I missed the lengthier book, though, which has the standard background, analysis, tables to illustrate points and to give them perspective. I implemented the second approach in two places – at the waiting room in a client’s office and in the living room – and I discovered that I was absorbing much more. I was virtually snatching valuable time to get nuggets from Jack Welch!

Try it. You turn a page, get page 59, and you chance upon this catchy title: “Use Acquisition to Make the Quantum Leap.” It was all about the two largest acquisitions in GE’s history: RCA in 1985 and Honeywell in October 2000. Expectedly, you will read on.

Try page 99, and you get Leadership Secret 16, which runs: “Act Like a Small Company.” Jack Welch could have basked in the magnitude and vastness of GE as monolith. But, the author says, Welch “did away with those layers of management that were clogging the GE machine.”

And he quotes Welch: “Small companies move faster. They know the penalties for hesitation in the marketplace… With fewer layers and less camouflage, the leaders show up very clearly on the screen.”

The expected weakness of a menu of thoughts by a CEO like Jack Welch became its strength: The book comes fresh -- like a well-timed, unexpected advice from a friend or a serendipitous chance encounter with a startling truth! All the same, the book gives you stolen moments with one of the most successful CEOs the world over. And such moments, as we know, are treasured and well-remembered.

But, the success of “Get Better or Get Beaten!” does not necessarily rub off on books that simply enumerate “a list of how to’s”. Why? Because this Jack Welch distillation has suitably given background to every leadership secret, and thus illuminates the point each time. Top business biographer Slater gets part of the credit.

For example, Leadership Secret 3 says, “Managing Less Is Managing Better.” Lest you abdicate the role of management, Slater volunteers this explanation: “Jack Welch wants managers to do less monitoring, less supervising, to give their employees more latitude, and he wants more decision-making at the lower levels of the company.”

Slater hastens to add: “He (Welch) is not saying, however, that managers should just go off to the golf course at noon every day.”

The book offers leadership in four parts in clusters of thought. At any rate, you can have random readings every day.
When you have “Daily Bread” for your devotional readings, and you have Jack Welch in your clutch bag for every conceivable decision opportunity, you are well prepared for every business day. You will never know the moment you need it. The answer could just be a page away.