Winning - Jack Welch [25]
A year later, Hitachi rolled out a large-bore machine and captured a significant piece of the market. We spent two years playing catch-up.
The last thing I want to sound like with this story is a hero.
Just the opposite.
I should have pushed a whole lot harder with my questioning. In fact, I should have insisted we put resources into developing our own large-bore machine. All we were left with at the end was me thinking, “I knew it,” and wanting to say, “I told you so.”
Both of those sentiments are worth nothing. You would assume that was obvious, but I’ve seen more leaders believe that second-guessing absolves them from responsibility when things go wrong. Years ago, I used to see a well-known CEO socially on a fairly regular basis. Whenever his company had been in the news for screwing up, he’d always say something like, “I knew they shouldn’t have done that.” For some reason that made him feel better, but what did it matter?
We’ve all been guilty at one point or another in our careers of boasting of perfect hindsight.
It’s a terrible sin.
If you don’t make sure your questions and concerns are acted upon, it doesn’t count.
I realize most people don’t love the probing process. It’s annoying to believe in a product or come into a room with a beautiful presentation only to have it picked apart with questions from the boss.
But that’s the job. You want bigger and better solutions. Questions, healthy debate, decisions, and action will get everyone there.
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RULE 7. Leaders inspire risk taking and learning by setting the example.
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Winning companies embrace risk taking and learning.
But in reality, these two concepts often get lip service—and little else. Too many managers urge their people to try new things and then whack them in the head when they fail. And too many live in not-invented-here worlds of their own making.
If you want your people to experiment and expand their minds, set the example yourself.
Consider risk taking. You can create a culture that welcomes risk taking by freely admitting your mistakes and talking about what you’ve learned from them.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve told people about my first big mistake—and it was huge—blowing up a pilot plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1963. I was across the street in my office when the explosion occurred, set off by a spark igniting a large tank of volatile solution. The noise was enormous, and then roof shingles and shards of glass flew everywhere. Smoke blanketed the area. Thank God no one was hurt.*
Despite the enormity of my mistake, my boss’s boss, a former MIT professor named Charlie Reed, didn’t beat me up. Instead, his sympathetic, scientific probing of the reasons for the incident taught me not only how to improve our manufacturing process, but more importantly, how to deal with people when they were down.
That wasn’t the only mistake in my career; I made plenty. I bought the investment bank Kidder Peabody—a cultural fit disaster—and made many wrong hires, to name just two more.
These experiences were nothing to feel great about, but I talked about them openly in order to show that it was OK to take swings and miss, as long as you learned from them.
You don’t need to be preachy or particularly somber about your errors. In fact, the more humorous and lighthearted you can be about them, the more people will get the message that mistakes aren’t fatal.
As for learning—again, live it yourself. Just because you’re the boss doesn’t mean you’re the source of all knowledge. Whenever I learned about a best practice that I liked at another company, I would come back to GE and make a scene. Maybe I often overstated the case, but I wanted people to know how enthusiastic I was about the new idea. And I was!
You can—and should—learn from one another too. Remember that executive in Chicago who asked me how he could appraise people who were smarter than he was? The answer I gave him was, “Learn from them. In the best-case scenario, all your people will be smarter than you. It doesn’t mean you can