Winning - Jack Welch [122]
At the same time, Jeff has made significant changes to the portfolio that positioned GE for future growth. He made major media, medical, financial services, and infrastructure acquisitions, while disposing of slower-growth industrial and insurance assets. He reinvigorated GE’s research and development activities with large facility investments in Munich, Shanghai, and Schenectady, New York. And Jeff has put enormous emphasis on diversity at GE, with immediate and positive results.
Several times in this book, I’ve said that change is good. Jeff sure proves that point.
As for how and why I picked Jeff, I just don’t ever talk about that. There were three terrific people to choose from—Jeff, Bob Nardelli, and Jim McNerney. There is no reason to conduct a public autopsy on the process—it’s past. Both Bob and Jim have gone on to have spectacular runs in their new roles—Bob as CEO of The Home Depot and Jim at 3M.
What I will say is that at the end of the day, the board and I picked whom we believed to be the best leader for GE, and Jeff is making us all look very good.
This question was posed at a management conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, and during a twelve-person business dinner in London:
What’s the future of the European Union?
Long-term, it’s very good.
With all the sound and fury about China, some people see the EU as a huge, lumbering bureaucracy that will never get its collective act together fast enough to reach its full potential in the global economy. Maybe that’s true in the short run, but in time, the EU will prove naysayers wrong.
Remember, the economic EU is less than fifteen years old. It’s already come a long way. Imagine trying to put together the fifty states of the United States today. Now imagine doing that if each state had operated for centuries with a separate government, set of laws, language, currency, and culture, as the members of the EU have. That the EU has done so well in so short a time is actually sort of amazing.*
Without question, the EU still has a way to go before it realizes the economic hopes and dreams of its supporters. But its current statistics are enough to give you a sense of the potential to be unleashed. With twenty-five countries, the EU has 450 million people, 50 percent more than the United States, and a GDP of $11 trillion, about the same as the United States, two and a half times Japan, and about seven times China.
These numbers are impressive, but they’ll only get better as the EU feels the impact of its newest members, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and the other nations of “New Europe.” In the past decade, from Budapest to Bratislava, from Prague to Warsaw, I’ve seen the excitement, optimism—and the remarkable achievements—in these countries. A new generation of entrepreneurs and small-business people are thirsting for opportunity and success. Their governments have responded in kind, reducing taxes and providing other probusiness incentives. The result has been significant economic growth, especially in comparison to what’s going on in Old Europe.
Yes, Old Europe has problems and a long history. Brussels is filled with bureaucrats, and the individual governments of many countries are fighting tooth and nail to hang on to their hard-earned sovereignty. With their entrenched cultural traditions, France and Germany in particular are lukewarm about the EU, and often act with blatant self-interest.
But these problems are not insurmountable. Washington, Tokyo, and Beijing have plenty of bureaucrats too. And as new generations of political leaders emerge across Europe, and the leadership of the EU itself gains increasing stature with every passing year, the pull of parochial, old-economic-order governments will give way. For example, the French government recently began to ease its rigid support of the thirty-five-hour week and is now proposing that companies be allowed to negotiate directly with employees about work schedules.
In time—and