Winning - Jack Welch [133]
I particularly liked the people who had had the wind knocked clear out of them but proved they could run even harder in the next race.
A good rule of thumb is not to hire someone into the last job of his or her career, unless it’s to be head of a function or CEO.
Don’t beat yourself up if you get hiring wrong some of the time. Just remember, the mistake is yours to fix.
If you managed a baseball team, would you listen more closely to the team accountant or the director of player personnel?
Pastor-parent types see the hidden hierarchies in people’s minds—the invisible org chart that exists at every company.
Very few companies have meaningful evaluation systems in place. That’s not just bad—it’s terrible!
Plaques and public fanfare have their place. But without money, rewards lose a lot of their impact.
Good people never think they’ve reached the top of their game. But they’re dying to get there!
Ideally, the star will be replaced within eight hours. This sends the message that no single individual is bigger than the company.
A slider just shows up at work and goes through the motions.
Hierarchies tend to make little generals out of perfectly normal people who find themselves in organizations that respond only to rank.
Make your company flatter. Managers should have ten direct reports at the minimum and 30 to 50 percent more if they are experienced.
Every employee, not just the senior people, should know how a company is doing.
The most complex and delicate kind of firing is when an individual has to be let go because of poor performance.
He blew up in anger, shouting, “You’ve got to be crazy. We don’t fire people at this company!”
Every person who leaves goes on to represent your company. They can bad-mouth or praise.
Unfortunately, it took about a year before Steve was let go. At every staff meeting, we watched in agony as the self-confidence seeped out of him.
Yes, the employee has done a poor job. But until he departs, your job is to make sure he doesn’t feel as if he is in a leper colony.
If the company has been through enough change programs, employees consider you like gas pains. You’ll go away if they just wait long enough.
Real change agents comprise less than 10 percent of all businesspeople. They have courage—a certain fearlessness about the unknown.
Managers often hold on to resisters because of a specific skill set or because they’ve been around for a long time. Don’t!
It goes without saying that no businessperson wants disasters to occur, but they will.
Managers can waste a lot of time at the outset of a crisis denying that something went wrong. Skip that step.
There is a silver lining to crisis management in that you rarely have to live through the same disaster twice.
I’m not saying that the correct mind-set means you should fold at the get-go. Sometimes you are absolutely clean and you need to fight.
During a crisis, your lawyers will tell you to say less, not more. That advice is not all wrong. But don’t take it as gospel.
Your lack of visibility will be taken as an admission of guilt, the same way it looks to laypeople when someone does not take the stand in his own defense.
With big crises, don’t ever forget you have a business to run.
When it comes to strategy, ponder less and do more.
Strategy means making clear-cut choices about how to compete. You cannot be everything to everybody, no matter what the size of your business or how deep its pockets.
If they’re headed in the right direction and are broad enough, strategies don’t really need to change all that often.
Strategy also means matching people with jobs—a match that often depends on where a business is on the commodity continuum.
Companies and their people love to share success stories. All you have to do is ask.
The right budgeting process can change how a company functions—and reinventing the ritual makes winning so