Winning - Jack Welch [2]
You will meet a lot of people in this book. Some may remind you of yourself, some may just seem very familiar:
There’s the CEO who presents the company with a list of noble values—say, quality, customer service, and respect—but never really explains what it means to live them. There’s the middle manager who fumes during a meeting with another division of his company, knowing that his coworkers could do so much more—if they just stopped patting themselves on the back for a minute. There is the employee who has been underperforming for years but is just so friendly and nice—and clueless—you can’t bring yourself to let her go. There is the colleague you can’t look in the eye because he is a “Dead Man Walking,” slowly and painfully being managed out the door. There are the employees who eat lunch every day at what they have dubbed “The Table of Lost Dreams,” making a show of their resentment of authority. There’s the engineer who spent fifteen years building a great career, only to throw it in one day when she realized that she had juggled life and work to make everyone happy—but herself.*
You’ll also meet a lot of people whose stories are examples of innovation, insight, and grit.
There’s David Novak, the energetic young CEO of Yum! Brands, who has turned every one of Yum!’s more than thirty-three thousand restaurant chain outlets into a laboratory of new ideas and the entire organization into a learning machine. There’s Denis Nayden, the consummate change agent, who never settles for good enough and has intensity to burn. There’s Jimmy Dunne, who rebuilt his company out of the ashes of the World Trade Center, using love, hope, and an attitude that anything is possible. There’s Susan Peters, a working mother and the No. 2 HR executive at GE, who could write a book herself on successfully navigating the hills and valleys of work-life balance. There is Chris Navetta, the CEO of U.S. Steel Kosice, who helped transform a struggling city in Slovakia while turning a former state-owned steel mill into a flourishing, profitable enterprise. There’s Kenneth Yu, the head of 3M’s Chinese operations, who catapulted his businesses from modest to high growth by throwing out the phony ritual of annual budgeting and replacing it with a sky’s-the-limit dialogue about opportunities. There’s Mark Little, who was devastated after a demotion at GE but fought his way back to a huge promotion with courage, perseverance, and great results.
People are everything when it comes to winning, and so this book is a lot about people—in some cases, the mistakes they’ve made, but more often, their successes. But mostly this book is about ideas and the power of putting them into action.
Now, at this point, there might be readers out there who are skeptical. They’re thinking: Winning is just too nuanced and complex a topic to cover in twenty chapters. I don’t care how many people and ideas are in this book!
Yes, winning is nuanced and complex, not to mention brutally hard.
But it also happens to be achievable. You can win. But to do that, you need to know what makes winning happen.
This book offers no easy formulas. There are none.
Depending on the chapter, this book does, however, give you guidelines to follow, rules to consider, assumptions to adopt, and mistakes to avoid. The strategy chapter provides a three-step process; the chapter on finding the right job offers you good signs and warning signals. There are also several themes you’ll hear again and again: the team with the best players wins, so find and retain the best players; don’t overbrain