Jack

This book is vintage Jack Welch: down to earth, powerful, and filled with common sense.

As CEO of General Electric for the past twenty years, he has bult its market cap by more than $450 billion and established himself as the most admired business leader in the world. His championing of initiatives like Six Sigma quality, globalization, and e-business have helped define the modern corporation. At the same time, he's a gutsy boss who has forged a unique philosophy and an operating system that relies on a "boundaryless" sharing of ideas, an intense focus on people, and an informal, give-and-take style that makes bureaucracy the enemy.

In anecdotal detail and with self-effacing humour, Jack Welch gives us the people (most notably his Irish mother) who shaped his life and the big hits and the big misses that characterized his career.

Starting at GE in 1960 as an engineer earning $10,000, Jack learned the need for "getting out of the pile" when his first raise was the same as everyone else's. He stayed out of the corporate bureaucracy while running a $2 billion collection of GE businesses — in a sweater and blue jeans — out of a Hilton in Pittsfield, Massachussetts.

After avoiding GE's Fairfield, Conecticut, headquarters for years, Jack was eventually summoned by then Chairman Reg Jones, who was planning his succession. There ensued one of the most painful parts of his career — Jack's dark-horse struggle, filled with political tension, to make it to the CEO's chair. A Hug from Reg confirmed Jack was the new boss — and started the GE transformation.

Welch walks us through the "Neutron Jack" years, when GE's employment rolls fell by more than 100,000 as part of a strategy to "fix, sell, or close" each business… and how he used the purchase of RCA to provide a foundation for the company's future earnings.

They were mistakes, too — and Jack confronts them openly. In "Too Full of Myself", he describes one of the biggest blunders: the purchase of Kidder Peabody, which ran counter to GE's culture.

The riveting story of his last year — the elaborate process of selecting a successor and the attempts to buy Honeywell — is also told in compelling detail.

This book is laced with refreshing interludes, such as "A Short Reflection on Gold", that captures Jack's competitiveness and the importance of friendship in his life. Destined to become a business classic, Jack: Straight From the Gut is a deeply personal journey filled with passion and a sheer lust for life.

• Section I: Early Years
1. Building Self-Confidence
2. Getting Out of the Pile
3. Blowing the Roof Off
4. Flying Below the Radar
5. Getting Closer to the Big Leagues
6. Swimming in a Bigger Pond
• Section II: Building a Philosophy
7. Dealing with Reality and "Superficial Congeniality"
8. The Vision Thing
9. The Neutron Years
10. The RCA Deal
11. The People Factory
12. Remaking Crotonville to Remake GE
13. Boundaryless: Taking Ideas to the Bottom Line
14. Deep Dives
• Section III: Ups and Downs
15. Too Full of Myself
16. GE Capital: The Growth Engine
17. Mixing NBC with Light Bulbs
18. When to Fight, When to Fold
• Section IV: Game Changers
19. Globalization
20. Growing Services
21. Six Sigma and Beyond
22. E-Business
• Section V: Looking Back, Looking Forward
23. "Go Home, Mr. Welch"
24. What This CEO Thing Is All About
25. A Short reflection on Gold
26. "New Guy"

A classical book.

I tried to refrain from reading it, but in the end it showed itself to be well written and interesting (and extremely one-sided, but what do you expect?).

Read it and enjoy it, but don't expect to receive any enlightment.