Jack - Straight from the Gut

U la la. Weird feeling that is when content you’re hearing in the very moment sounds familiar. The previous lecture about General Electric entitled “Winning” I believed filled me in with enough details, and wanted to stop listening. But I persisted and ended up being happy about it.

Some content present in this book didn’t show up in “Winning” and is actually totally new content. After which I reminded myself that’s the autobiography of Jack Welch.

Looks like Welch has been raised by parents who knew early on they were to create a leader. Or maybe… they were just normal, and praised him just like normal parents praise their children.

His story about him not knowing during his childhood how short he is was funny.

Tough and rough strategy made GE reach pretty good results. I think 4000% stated by Wikipedia isn’t a bad score. Effort put into reducing bureaucracy and staying within “Top 2” companies businesses was the main GE’s direction for the large portion of the corporate strategy (interesting too is the completely reverse direction they took, when only 10% of the potential market could belong to GE)

Number of negotiations and acquisitions mentioned in a book let me understand how buying a company can be hard, and how big failure it can be. Negotiating with Honeywell was something that kind-of-disagrees with Felix Dennis, but we’re talking about money above Felix’s “filthy rich”, since these are internal transactions between bit fishes.

Book made me realize climbing corporate ladder is not something I want to do for a living. Hard to climb something with 29 steps in case of GE. Other companies are slightly better, but still - idea of people graded with numbers makes little sense to me. Makes sense only for getting $$$ out of your company’s pockets and justifying why not everybody gets a lot.

The good thing about being on the top of the ladder is that you can play golf with cool people..

For the general understanding of business and background of business thinking in big organizations, this book is perfect. I really enjoyed it.