Winning - Jack Welch [118]
Earn a lot of chits. Redeem as needed; replenish often.
Achieving work-life balance is a process. Getting it right is iterative. You get better at it with experience and observation, and eventually, after some time passes, you notice it’s not getting harder anymore. It’s just what you do.
TYING UP LOOSE ENDS
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20. HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE
The Questions That Almost Got Away
20
Here, There, and Everywhere
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THE QUESTIONS THAT ALMOST GOT AWAY
BACK IN THE INTRODUCTION, I said that I was inspired to write this book by the questions I received traveling around the world over the past several years. Most of those questions, and my answers to them, ended up fitting into the nineteen chapters preceding this one.
A few questions, however, just couldn’t be wedged into one topic area or another, be it leadership, hiring, change, strategy, or work-life balance. They were too broad, narrow, specific, or unusual. They just defied categorization.
And yet these questions actually call to mind several of the themes that run through this book—the importance of candor and positive energy, for instance, the effectiveness of differentiation, the importance of voice, the power of authenticity and meritocracy, and the absolute necessity of change and never letting yourself be a victim.
So I’m going to end this book with the “questions that almost got away,” hoping that they cover any territory I’ve missed, and perhaps even remind you of some of the major signposts of the territory we’ve covered so far.
This question was posed at a working dinner in Mexico City, attended by about thirty CEOs from various industries:
We spent the last ten years bringing our company up to speed with training and process improvements, and with our low-cost labor, we were extremely competitive. But now we’re getting killed by China. How can we stay alive?
I’ve heard some form of this question everywhere—except China, of course.
When I was in Dublin in 2001, for instance, a couple of months after Gateway announced it was closing up shop, an Irish technology executive anxiously asked, “Does this mean the end of the long boom for us?” In Milan in 2004, I spoke with a German manager who wondered if his company’s only hope was to sell out to an Asian company that wanted his European distribution capability. At a conference in Chicago the same year, a machine parts manufacturer based in Cleveland described in agonizing detail how the Chinese kept lowering and lowering the price of their competing products. “Will there be any manufacturing jobs left in Ohio?” he asked.
There is no easy answer to the China question. Yes, you hear about China’s problems—its scarcity of middle managers, for instance, and the massive number of poor farming families moving into unprepared cities with not enough jobs to support them. Lumbering, bureaucratic state-owned enterprises still make up most of its economy. And the country’s banks are saddled with bad loans.
But for China, these aren’t mountains to be scaled, they’re blips to be flattened by the giant, high-speed bulldozer that is its economy. Increasing prosperity from spectacular economic growth over the past twenty years has given the Chinese enormous self-confidence. But China has so much more: a massive pool of low-cost, hardworking laborers and a rapidly expanding number of well-educated engineers.
And then, there’s its work ethic, which may be its single biggest strength. Entrepreneurship and competition are baked into the Chinese culture. Consider the executive who hosted me during a weeklong visit to Shanghai and Beijing last year. She said she’s at the office from 7:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., goes home for dinner to join her husband and son until 8:00 p.m., and then returns to work until midnight. “This is very typical here,” she said, “six days a week.” And she works for a U.S. multinational!
So, faced with the inevitability of China, what do you do?
First and foremost, get out of the tank. The sense of bleakness that I heard from Mexico to