| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780060753948 | | Publisher: HarperBusiness | | Publish Date: 4/1/2005 | | Buy.com Sku: 39981980 | | Item#: R2GL5W | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9.5H x 6.25L x 1.5T | | Pages: 384 |
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| | | | Winning is destined to become the bible of business for generations to come. It clearly and succinctly lays out the answers to the most difficult, important questions people face both on and off the job. Welch's objective is to speak to people at every level of the organization, in companies large and small. His audience is everyone from line workers to college students and MBAs, from project managers to senior executives. He describes his core business principles and devotes most of Winning to the real "stuff" of work--how to lead, hire, get ahead, even write a budget. Welch's optimistic, no excuses, get-it-done mind set is riveting. His goal is to help anyone and everyone who has a passion for success. From The Publisher:
Jack Welch knows how to win. During his forty-year career at General Electric, he led the company to year-after-year success around the globe, in multiple markets, against brutal competition. His honest, be-the-best style of management became the gold standard in business, with his relentless focus on people, teamwork, and profits. Since Welch retired in 2001 as chairman and chief executive officer of GE, he has traveled the world, speaking to more than 250,000 people and answering their questions on dozens of wide-ranging topics. Inspired by his audiences and their hunger for straightforward guidance, Welch has written both a philosophical and pragmatic book, which is destined to become the bible of business for generations to come. It clearly lays out the answers to the most difficult questions people face both on and off the job. Welch's objective is to speak to people at every level of an organization, in companies large and small. His audience is everyone from line workers to MBAs, from project managers to senior executives. His goal is to help everyone who has a passion for success. Welch begins Winning with an introductory section called "Underneath It All," which describes his business philosophy. He explores the importance of values, candor, differentiation, and voice and dignity for all. The core of Winning is devoted to the real "stuff" of work. This main part of the book is split into three sections. The first looks inside the company, from leadership to picking winners to making change happen. The second section looks outside, at the competition, with chapters on strategy, mergers, and Six Sigma, to name just three. The next section of the book is about managing your career -- from finding the right job to achieving work-life balance. Welch's optimistic, no excuses, get-it-done mind-set is riveting. Packed with personal anecdotes and written in Jack's distinctive no b.s. voice, Winning offers deep insights, original thinking, and solutions to nuts-and-bolts problems that will change the way people think about work. About The Author:
Jack Welch began his career with the General Electric Company in 1960, and in 1981 became the company's eighth chairman and CEO. During his tenure, GE's market capitalization increased by $400 billion, making it the world's most valuable corporation. Mr. Welch is currently the head of Jack Welch, LLC, where he serves as an advisor to a small group of Fortune 500 CEOs and speaks to businesspeople and students around the world. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Jack: Straight from the Gut.
Annotation:
Now retired from his position as CEO of General Electric, business legend Jack Welch downloads a lifetime of experience in this how-to for success in business. Beginning with a foundational section on motivation and philosophy, he follows with sections on "Your Business" and "Your Competition," tackling the nuts and bolts of everyday business, such as the interview and the evaluation. He closes with "Your Career," which includes a wealth of advice on self-management and self-presentation in business, as well as on how to balance the demands of home and office. Written in Welch's confident, experienced tone, WINNING expresses his "lead, don't manage" philosophy, as he suggests ways to inspire and develop the leadership skills of employees. "When you become a leader, success is all about growing others," he says. Welch illustrates his lessons with anecdotes based on his own experience, including one about his "first big mistake--and it was huge--blowing up a pilot plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1963." Welch tells how the "scientific, sympathetic probing" by his boss's boss for the reasons behind the mistake taught him "how to deal with people when they are down." Writing about bad attitudes and negativity, Welch writes about a friend who felt useless when his company merged with another company. Welch advised his friend to "swallow your pride, prove your worth, and start again." A year later his friend reported that he followed Jack's advice and was thriving in his new role. Jack Welch's WINNING comes from the gut, the heart, and the mind of a leader who wants to pass on what he knows.
| PraiseNewsweek
"Smart, practical and not afraid to address tough subjects." - Daniel McGinn 04/04/2005Publishers Weekly
"Welch knows what he's talking about, and here offers an admirably concise primer on how to do business that's a paragon of tough common sense." 04/05/2005 USA Today
"[Welch] is giving back what he learned, and not just to fellow CEOs. He is able to write a book that might just reach the rest of us....[Welch] goes beyond the anecdotal with insights from other corporate players, and its good to find numerous stories of female executives facing challenges and winning." - Kerry Hannon 04/13/2005 |
| | Read A Chapter | Chapter One Mission and Values So Much Hot Air About Something So Real Bear with me, if you will, while I talk about mission and values. I say that because these two terms have got to be among the most abstract, overused, misunderstood words in business. When I speak with audiences, I'm asked about them frequently, usually with some level of panic over their actual meaning and relevance. (In New York, I once got the question "Can you please define the difference between a mission and a value, and also tell us what difference that difference makes?") Business schools add to the confusion by having their students regularly write mission statements and debate values, a practice made even more futile for being carried out in a vacuum. Lots of companies do the same to their senior executives, usually in an attempt to create a noble-sounding plaque to hang in the company lobby. Too often, these exe Click to read more... Chapter One Mission and Values So Much Hot Air About Something So Real Bear with me, if you will, while I talk about mission and values. I say that because these two terms have got to be among the most abstract, overused, misunderstood words in business. When I speak with audiences, I'm asked about them frequently, usually with some level of panic over their actual meaning and relevance. (In New York, I once got the question "Can you please define the difference between a mission and a value, and also tell us what difference that difference makes?") Business schools add to the confusion by having their students regularly write mission statements and debate values, a practice made even more futile for being carried out in a vacuum. Lots of companies do the same to their senior executives, usually in an attempt to create a noble-sounding plaque to hang in the company lobby. Too often, these exercises end with a set of generic platitudes that do nothing but leave employees directionless or cynical. Who doesn't know of a mission statement that reads something like, "XYZ Company values quality and service," or, "Such-and-Such Company is customer-driven." Tell me what company doesn't value quality and service or focus on its customers! And who doesn't know of a company that has spent countless hours in emotional debate only to come up with values that, despite the good intentions that went into them, sound as if they were plucked from an all-purpose list of virtues including "integrity, quality, excellence, service, and respect." Give me a break -- every decent company espouses these things! And frankly, integrity is just a ticket to the game. If you don't have it in your bones, you shouldn't be allowed on the field. By contrast, a good mission statement and a good set of values are so real they smack you in the face with their concreteness. The mission announces exactly where you are going, and the values describe the behaviors that will get you there. Speaking of that, I prefer abandoning the term values altogether in favor of just behaviors. But for the sake of tradition, let's stick with the common terminology. First: About That Mission .... In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business? It does not answer: What were we good at in the good old days? Nor does it answer: How can we describe our business so that no particular unit or division or senior executive gets pissed off? Instead, the question "How do we intend to win in this business?" is defining. It requires companies to make choices about people, investments, and other resources, and it prevents them from falling into the common mission trap of asserting they will be all things to all people at all times. The question forces companies to delineate their strengths and weaknesses in order to assess where they can profitably play in the competitive landscape. Yes, profitably -- that's the key. Even Ben & Jerry's, the crunchy granola, hippy, save-the-world ice cream company based in Vermont, has "profitable growth" and "increasing value for stakeholders" as one of the elements of its three-part mission statement because its executives know that without financial success, all the social goals in the world don't have a chance. That's not saying a mission shouldn't be bold or aspirational. Ben & Jerry's, for instance, wants to sell "all natural ice cream and euphoric concoctions" and "improve the quality of life locally, nationally and internationally." That kind of language is great in that it absolutely has the power to excite people and motivate them to stretch. At the end of the day, effective mission statements balance the possible and the impossible. They give people a clear sense of the direction to profitability and the inspiration to feel they are part of something big and important. Take our mission at GE as an example. From 1981 through 1995, we said we were going to be "the most competitive enterprise in the world" by being No. 1 or No. 2 in every market -- fixing, selling, or closing every underperforming business that couldn't get there. There could be no doubt about what this mission meant or entailed. It was specific and descriptive, with nothing abstract going on. And it was aspirational, too, in its global ambition. This mission came to life in a bunch of different ways. First off, in a time when business strategy was mainly kept in an envelope in headquarters and any information about it was the product of the company gossip mill, we talked openly about which businesses were already No. 1 or No. 2, and which businesses had to get repaired quickly or be gone. Such candor shocked the system, but it did wonders for making the mission real to our people. They may have hated it when businesses were sold, but they understood why. Moreover, we harped on the mission constantly, at every meeting large and small. Every decision or initiative was linked to the mission. We publicly rewarded people who drove the mission and let go of people who couldn't deal with it for whatever reason, usually nostalgia for their business in the "good old days." Now, it is possible that in 1981 we could have come up with an entirely different mission for GE. Say after lots of debate and an in-depth analysis of technology,competitors, and customers,we had decided we wanted to become the most innovative designer of electrical products in the world. Or say we had decided that our most profitable route would have been to quickly and thoroughly globalize every business we had, no matter what its market position. Either of these missions would have sent GE off on an entirely different road from the one we took. They would have required us to buy and sell different businesses than we did, or hire and let go of different people, and so forth ... Continues...
Excerpted from Winning by Welch, Jack Excerpted by permission.
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