Winning - Jack Welch [101]
Dan Henson is another case in point. Dan was running a GE Capital lending business in London when he had the courage to volunteer to spearhead Six Sigma throughout GE Capital, a business where a lot of people doubted it had any value. Dan found out exactly where Six Sigma applied, and equally important, where it did not. In two years, Dan achieved variation reduction in highly repetitive activities, such as credit card processing and mortgage insurance applications, and the results were impressive. Today, Dan is CEO of one of GE Capital’s largest businesses, Vendor Financial Services.
GE is so big, if Wayne and Dan hadn’t put themselves on the radar screen, who knows when they would have been made CEOs. Certainly, it would have happened eventually, but not nearly as quickly.*
The best proof of the radar screen dynamic is in the numbers. Today, more than half of the senior vice presidents reporting to Jeff Immelt have worked in global assignments, and one-third of the company’s approximately 180 officers have significant Six Sigma experience.
Amassing mentors. The third career do concerns mentors, a burning topic while I was at GE, and these days, wherever I speak.
People, it seems, are always looking for that one right mentor to help them get ahead.
But in my experience, there is no one right mentor. There are many right mentors.
I had dozens of informal mentors over the course of my career, and each one taught me something important. My mentors ranged from the classic older and wiser executive to coworkers who were often younger than I was.
Some mentoring relationships lasted a lifetime, others lasted just weeks.
One of the most meaningful mentors in my life never called himself my mentor, nor did I ever identify him that way. I thought of Si Cathcart, who was ten years my senior and a member of the GE board, as my friend. To my great sadness, he died in 2002.
Si was everything people look for in a great mentor—a person who cheered me on and challenged me in equal measure. His judgment about people was pitch-perfect, and I rarely made a big decision on hiring without running it by him first. During the toughest period of my career, when I was choosing a successor to recommend to the board, Si spent several hundred hours over the course of five years visiting all of the candidates and sharing his impressions with me.*
Si, the longtime chairman of Illinois Tool Works, was on the GE board when I became CEO. We played golf often and chatted on the phone regularly. Si used both these venues to push my thinking up unseen alleys and around blind corners. “Are you sure that guy’s not a phony?” he would ask. “Do you think that acquisition is still going to make you happy when the fanfare dies down?” Si always knew the right question to ask.
I had another great mentor in Dennis Dammerman, who was not only younger than me by ten years, but my subordinate as well.
I met Dennis in 1977, when I was named head of GE’s consumer products group. I arrived in the job knowing basically nothing about insurance or financing, the main activities of GE Capital, one of the group’s businesses. Dennis, whom I had hired as my financial analyst, had spent several years there.
For months on end, Dennis taught me something every single day. His patience was remarkable. Here was his boss asking him to define the simplest concepts—I barely understood types of debt in those days. After all, I had come from the manufacturing side of GE. When we wanted money, all we did was make a pitch to corporate, and if the proposal was good enough, they sent it. Suddenly, I was dealing with combined ratios, delinquencies, leveraged leases, and the like.
Dennis basically downloaded his brain into mine.