Winning - Jack Welch [24]
You have to kill the deal, even if that pisses people off.
Sometimes the hardest gut calls involve picking people. You meet a candidate who has all the right stuff. His résumé is perfect: prestigious schools and great experience. His interview is impressive: firm handshake, good eye contact, smart questions, and so on. But something nags at you. Maybe he’s moved around an awful lot—he’s just had too many jobs in too few years without a plausible enough explanation. Or his energy seems too frantic. Or one previous boss said nice things about him but didn’t sound as though he really meant them.
And you’re left with that uh-oh feeling in your stomach again.
Don’t hire the guy.
You’ve been made a leader because you’ve seen more and been right more times. Listen to your gut. It’s telling you something.
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RULE 6. Leaders probe and push with a curiosity that borders on skepticism, making sure their questions are answered with action.
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When you are an individual contributor, you try to have all the answers. That’s your job—to be an expert, the best at what you do, maybe even the smartest person in the room.
When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?”
When I was first made a manager, in 1963, I was running a start-up with a product that went to market through a large pool sales force. I knew we weren’t getting enough attention from the people in the field. So every weekend I would take home carbon copies of the sales reports filed after every customer visit—piles of them. On Mondays, I would make a pest of myself with a round of phone calls, asking the salespeople or the plant manager to explain everything I didn’t understand. Why, for instance, were we giving truckload pricing to one customer for small lot sales? Why was another customer getting a product with black specks?
These questions got the sales team to give our product the attention it needed and increased my understanding of how it was sold.
Questioning, however, is never enough. You have to make sure your questions unleash debate and raise issues that get action.
Remember, just because you are a leader, saying something doesn’t mean it will happen.
That was the case back in the early ’90s when I was pretty much obsessed with the idea of an MRI machine with a larger opening. If you have ever had an MRI, you’ll know what I am talking about. You lie on your back and are slid inside a tunnel containing a spinning magnet.
At the time, the tunnel—or bore, as it was called—was very narrow, and patients were experiencing claustrophobia during the forty-minute MRI process. Word was that Hitachi was coming up with a machine with a much wider bore, but some members of our medical business dismissed the product. Hospitals, they said, would never accept the low-quality images such large-bore machines produced.*
Having experienced an MRI myself, I just wasn’t convinced. The machines did make you feel claustrophobic! Every chance I got, I asked the medical team to look at the situation again. Won’t hospitals compromise image quality for patient comfort, especially for simple procedures, like elbows and knees? Won’t the technology eventually improve?
In response, the medical team gave me the all-too-common business head fake. “We’ll look into it,” they kept assuring me. Of course they didn’t. I was a know-nothing, meddling pain in the neck, and they were just