Winning - Jack Welch [124]
Who would represent the share owners better on key committees than these three people? A professor? An accounting expert? The head of a charitable foundation? Why would share owners ever want company executives answering to people who might need a director’s salary to make ends meet? Those kinds of directors are less likely to challenge anything—they’re more likely to duck tough issues in the hope they get reappointed.
Let’s not forget that boards exist to support and guide, as well as challenge, management. It would be unfortunate indeed if Sarbanes-Oxley ends up making boards primarily adversarial in their approach. Board members can never forget their main job is to make the company work better, not to get into an us-versus-them dynamic with the very people they are supposed to help.
In the final analysis, the best directors share four very simple traits: good character, common sense, sound judgment—particularly about people—and the courage to speak up.
Laws are all well and good. But it is people, culture, processes, controls—and strong directors—that ultimately put compliance in a company’s blood.
This question came at a breakfast meeting in Copenhagen with about thirty European managers doing business for their global companies in Scandinavia:
I’m about to be transferred to run our operations in West Africa, and I’ve been told to expect that 40 percent of my workforce have AIDS or a family member suffering with the disease. Any suggestions for dealing with this problem?
No question ever floored me like this one.
And as if it wasn’t disturbing enough on its own, another person at the breakfast, an executive from a consumer goods company, spoke up right afterward. “I’m just back from our operations in Africa,” he said. “Try closer to 60 percent.”
What can a leader do in such a dire situation? What can a company do?
It is in confronting a societal problem that the results of a winning company and a good culture really come together to make a difference. At the outset of this book, I tried to make the case that winning is great because it inspires people to be happy, creative, and generous.
That was me talking from 20,000 feet. This question brings you right into the trenches.
The manager who asked this question worked for a highly profitable oil company, and I could feel that he really wanted to do something. He’ll be able to because his company is winning. He can launch programs to educate the workforce about AIDS. He can provide medical facilities and subsidize the expensive drugs the disease requires. He can really improve the lives of hundreds of people. I’ll bet he does.
Winning companies help all the time.
There are more than fifty thousand active volunteers among GE’s employees, involved in four thousand projects a year, from mentoring in schools around the world to participating in countless other programs for the disadvantaged. Because of the efforts of GE volunteers, there have been amazing community projects in Hungarian towns, Jakarta slums, and inner-city schools in Cincinnati. Not only were these projects great for the people who were helped, they were equally beneficial for the people doing the helping. Their volunteering in the streets gave their work at the office more meaning and vitality.
In Slovakia, Chris Navetta showed up in 2002 to manage U.S. Steel’s newly acquired sixteen-thousand-employee plant in Kosice, a city with 23 percent unemployment in the impoverished eastern region of the country. Chris and his team took a real relic of Communism—a money-losing state-owned enterprise—and with a $600 million investment, turned it into a highly profitable operation. While they were doing that, they poured time and money into Kosice. The list of their contributions is too long to print here, but it includes building an oncology wing at the local children’s hospital, remodeling primary school classrooms and providing them with computers, and refurbishing several orphanages and a facility for the blind.
Consider also the outpouring of support from businesses