Winning - Jack Welch [109]
IF EVER THERE WAS A CASE of “Do as I say not as I did,” this chapter is it. No one—myself included—would ever call me an authority on work-life balance. For forty-one years, my operating principle was work hard, play hard, and spend some time as a father.
Had the concept been around at the time, I am sure I would have described my life as perfectly balanced. It felt like it had everything in it, all in the right amounts.
I grew up in an era and as part of a culture where you struggled to go to college and get a decent degree. During school, or very shortly thereafter, you got married and started having kids. Getting a job and working your ass off at it was considered the ticket to a good life.
I followed this pattern without a lot of thought. Luckily for me, I found work to be enormously exciting. I saw the weekends as a time to play golf and party with other young couples.
But looking back, it is clear that the balance I chose had consequences for the people around me at home and at the office. For instance, my kids were raised, largely alone, by their mother, Carolyn.
By the same token, from my earliest days in Plastics, I used to show up at the office Saturday mornings. Not coincidentally, my direct reports showed up too. Personally, I thought these weekend hours were a blast. We would mop up the workweek in a more relaxed way and shoot the breeze about sports.
I never once asked anyone, “Is there someplace you would rather be—or need to be—for your family or favorite hobby or whatever?” The idea just didn’t dawn on me that anyone would want to be anywhere but at work.
My defense, if there is one, is that those were the times. In the 1960s and ’70s, all my direct reports were men. Many of those men were fathers, and fathers were different then. They did not, by and large, attend ballet recitals on Thursday afternoons or turn down job transfers because they didn’t want to disrupt their kids’ sports “careers.” Most of their wives did not have jobs with their own competing demands. In general, it was assumed that wives stayed at home to make everything run smoothly.
All that started to change, of course, in the ’80s, when women started moving up in the workforce, and by late in the decade, I started to hear a lot more about work-life balance. It initially bubbled up in many of our management development classes at Crotonville, where managers started to describe the pressures they felt trying to manage travel and transfers in two-career households. Debate about the topic within GE became more intense in the early ’90s, both at Crotonville and during meetings with the GE African American Forum, and it reached a new level of intensity later on during my meetings with members of the company’s Women’s Network.
These conversations forced me to confront something that I had never really confronted for myself—the conflicts involved in managing two full lives—the one at work and the one after hours, be it caring for kids, volunteering at a homeless shelter, or running marathons.
While work-life balance was increasingly front and center during the 1990s, the debate about it has only intensified since my retirement in 2001. Today, no CEO or company can ignore it. In fall 2004, for instance, the New York Times ran a front-page, three-part series on work-life balance and job stress. That same week, Fast Company’s cover story was entitled, “Still Worried About Work-Life Balance? Forget It. But Here’s How to Have a Life Anyway.” There is a whole consulting industry devoted to the subject, and too many books and Web sites about it to even estimate a number.
Not surprisingly, then, as I’ve traveled around the world for the past three years, I’ve gotten slews of work-life balance questions. The most common is, “How did you find time for all that golf and still become CEO?” but they run the gamut. Once, in Beijing, a man in the audience who looked to be in his thirties asked me, “How did you manage your children while you were managing GE?”
My answers to these questions have been of limited use, I’m sure. I say that