Winning - Jack Welch [98]
After a long year of negotiations, John found what he needed, a silicones joint venture with the German company Bayer, with GE holding a majority stake in the new company.
I recently asked him about this experience.
“It was just persistence, I guess,” he said. “I knew we had to become self-sufficient somehow. If we had just kept doing things as usual, even if we grew the business by a reasonable amount, we would have never broken out.”
Today, the European silicones business is No. 2 in the local market, and with a recent acquisition, its sales are more than $700 million.
As for John, he was promoted in 1998 to CEO of GE Transportation, and in 2003 to CEO of GE’s $8 billion plastics business.
YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY
If exceeding expectations is the most reliable way to get ahead, the most reliable way to sabotage yourself is to be a thorn in your organization’s rear end.
Of course, no one sets out to do that. But it happens, and every time it does, you force your boss to use his political capital in order to defend you.
At this point, probably most people are thinking, “Who me—make my boss use his political capital? Never.”*
Well, think again.
You can have the greatest results in the world, but if you don’t live your company’s values and behaviors, you run the risk of this happening.
Take the case of an extremely smart and capable employee I’ll call James. We hired James into our business development program at headquarters. This two-year, up-or-out program was designed for MBAs who had been with consulting firms for three or four years and wanted to get off that track and into operations. To test them, we put them in short, intense field assignments, transferring GE’s best practices from business to business. In most cases, one of our businesses would “steal” these MBAs from the program within a year and place them in meaningful operating positions.
James was about thirty-two when we brought him in from a top-tier consulting firm where he had worked since graduating from business school. He was European, articulate, and as I said, very bright, with excellent experience consulting in several industries. We figured at least three GE businesses would be fighting over him within six months.
A year came and went, and no one would touch him. I couldn’t figure out why until I sat in on his first performance review with his boss and the HR team. There I learned that James came into the office at ten or eleven each day and left late, at 8:00 p.m. or so. Those were plenty of hours to put in, and that kind of schedule was fine—for an individual contributor. We had people in R & D who liked to work at night, for instance, and people in sales who came and went according to the needs of their customers in three time zones.*
James’s hours, however, were not going to make it in a company where line managers generally showed up at 8:00 a.m. or earlier, and every meeting and work routine revolved around that.
But James didn’t seem to care about GE’s routines. He had his own way of doing things.
I saw that dynamic up close when James called my assistant and asked for an appointment. When we got together, after a few minutes of chitchat about his career, the real reason for his visit became clear.
“Would it be OK,” he asked, “if I flew my own plane to my meetings in the field?”
I told him he was nuts. “Do that only if you want to piss everyone off,” I said. “Your hours have already gotten you in enough trouble. That kind of showing off is going to kill you around here. It’s not our culture.”
“But I’d pay for the gas!”
“This is not about gas!” I said.
Despite James’s disconnect with our values, he did land a job in operations. Because of his brainpower, energy, and background, I put him in charge of a relatively small, troubled business we had acquired in Europe. Two American transplants hadn’t worked out. Putting James there was a classic corporate “stuff job,” in that I stuffed him (despite my misgivings) down the throat of the business.
It didn’t work. GE’s European business culture wasn’t any more