Winning - Jack Welch [12]
By the next review, we’d already be seeing candor’s positive impact with a better team in place, and with each successive cycle, more and more people made candor’s case with me.
Still, it wasn’t like I was singing with the whole chorus.
From the day I joined GE to the day I was named CEO, twenty years later, my bosses cautioned me about my candor. I was labeled abrasive and consistently warned that my candor would soon get in the way of my career.
Now my GE career is over, and I’m telling you that it was candor that helped make it work. So many more people got into the game, so many voices, so much energy. We gave it to one another straight, and each of us was better for it.
We’ve talked a lot in this chapter about one word. But it’s really very simple—candor works because candor unclutters.
Yes, yes, everyone agrees that candor is against human nature. So is waking up at five in the morning for the 6:10 train every day. So is eating lunch at your desk so you won’t miss an important meeting at one. But for the sake of your team or your organization, you do a lot of things that aren’t easy. The good thing about candor is that it’s an unnatural act that is more than worth it.
It is impossible to imagine a world where everyone goes around saying what they really think all the time. And you probably wouldn’t want it anyway—too much information! But even if we get halfway there, lack of candor won’t be the biggest dirty little secret in business anymore.
It will be its biggest change for the better.
3
Differentiation
* * *
CRUEL AND DARWINIAN? TRY FAIR AND EFFECTIVE
IF THERE IS ONE OF MY VALUES that really pushes buttons, it is differentiation.
Some people love the idea; they swear by it, run their companies with it, and will tell you it is at the very root of their success. Other people hate it. They call it mean, harsh, impractical, demotivating, political, unfair—or all of the above. Once, during a radio talk show about my first book, a woman in LA pulled off the highway to call in and label differentiation “cruel and Darwinian.” And that was just the beginning of her commentary!
Obviously, I am a huge fan of differentiation. I have seen it transform companies from mediocre to outstanding, and it is as morally sound as a management system can be. It works.
Companies win when their managers make a clear and meaningful distinction between top- and bottom-performing businesses and people, when they cultivate the strong and cull the weak. Companies suffer when every business and person is treated equally and bets are sprinkled all around like rain on the ocean.
When all is said and done, differentiation is just resource allocation, which is what good leaders do and, in fact, is one of the chief jobs they are paid to do. A company has only so much money and managerial time. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest. They cut their losses everywhere else.*
If that sounds Darwinian, let me add that I am convinced that along with being the most efficient and most effective way to run your company, differentiation also happens to be the fairest and the kindest. Ultimately, it makes winners out of everyone.
When I was at GE, people discussed differentiation vigorously, but over the years, most people came to strongly support it as our way of doing business. By the time I retired, differentiation was not really a hot topic anymore. The same can’t be said for outside the company! Without a doubt, differentiation receives the most questions I get from audiences around the world. As I said, people tend to love it or hate it, but a pretty large number are just confused by it. If I could change one thing about my first book, it would be to add more pages to the discussion of differentiation, explaining the topic inside and out, and stressing that differentiation cannot—and must not—be implemented quickly. At GE, it took us about a decade to install the kind of candor and trust that makes differentiation possible.
But this chapter is not about implementation. It’s about why