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Case analysis sections will be due each week. The sections will be compiled and refined into a comprehensive final case analysis

Evaluate Leadership Decisions Points Range: Clearly identifies three leadership qualities/strategies/ theories utilized by the primary leader when making decisions. Provides the specific outcome of using each quality/strategy/theory. Clearly identifies one additional

9 – 3 9 9 – 1 5 0

R E V : M A Y 3 , 2 0 0 5

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Research Associate Meg Wozny prepared this case under the supervision of Professor Christopher A. Bartlett. HBS cases are dev eloped solely as
the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective
management

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C H R I S T O P H E R A . B A R T L E T T

M E G W O Z N Y

GEâs Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welchâs
Leadership

On September 7, 2001, Jack Welch stepped down as CEO of General Electric. The sense of pride he
felt about the companyâs performance during the previous two decades seemed justified judging by
the many accolades GE was receiving. For the third consecutive year, it had not only been named
Fortuneâs âMost Admired Company in the United States,â but also Financial Timesâ âMost Admired
Company in the World.â And, on the eve of his retirement, Fortune had named Welch âManager of
the Centuryâ in recognition of his personal contribution to GEâs outstanding 20 year record.

Yet while the mood at GEâs 2001 annual meeting had clearly been upbeat, some shareholders
wondered whether anyone could sustain the blistering pace of change and growth characteristic of
the Welch era. And specifically, many worried if any successor could generate the 23% per annum
total shareholder return Welch had delivered in his two decades leading GE. It would be a tough act
to follow. (See Exhibit 1 for financial summary of Welchâs era at GE.)

The GE Heritage

Founded in 1878 by Thomas Edison, General Electric grew from its early focus on the generation,
distribution, and use of electric power to become, a hundred years later, one of the worldâs leading
diversified industrial companies. A century later, in addition to its core businesses in power
generation, household appliances, and lighting, the company was also engaged in businesses as
diverse as aircraft engines, medical systems, and diesel locomotives.

Long regarded as a bellwether of American management practices, GE was constantly undergoing
change. In the 1930s, it was a model of the eraâs highly centralized, tightly controlled corporate form.
By the 1950s, GE had delegated responsibility to hundreds of department managers, leading a trend
towards greater decentralization. But a subsequent period of âprofitless growthâ in the 1960s caused
the company to strengthen its corporate staffs and develop sophisticated strategic planning systems.
Again, GE found itself at the leading edge of management practice.

When Reg Jones, Welchâs predecessor, became CEO in 1973, he inherited the company that had
just completed a major reorganization. Overlaying its 10 groups, 46 divisions, and 190 departments

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399-150 GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership

were 43 strategic business units designed to support the strategic planning that was so central to GEâs
management process. Jones raised strategic planning to an art form, and GE again became the
benchmark for hundreds of companies that imitated its SBU-based structure and its sophisticated
planning processes. Soon, however, Jones was unable to keep up with reviewing and approving the
massive volumes of information generated by 43 strategic plans. Explaining that âthe review burden
had to be carried on more shoulders,â in 1977 he capped GEâs departments, divisions, groups, and
SBUs with a new organizational layer of âsectors,â representing macrobusiness agglomerations such
as consumer products, power systems, or technical products.

In addition to his focus on strategic planning, Jones spent a great deal of time on government
relations, becoming the countryâs leading business statesman. During the 1970s, he was voted CEO of
the Year three times by his peers, with one leading business journal dubbing him CEO of the Decade
in 1979. When he retired in 1981, The Wall Street Journal proclaimed Jones a âmanagement legend,â
adding that by handing the reins to Welch, GE had âreplaced a legend with a live wire.â

Welchâs Early Priorities: GEâs Restructuring

When the 45-year-old Welch became CEO in April 1981, the U.S. economy was in a recession.
High interest rates and a strong dollar exacerbated the problem, resulting in the countryâs highest
unemployment rates since the Depression. To leverage performance in GEâs diverse portfolio of
businesses, the new CEO challenged each to be âbetter than the bestâ and set in motion a series of
changes that were to radically restructure the company over the next five years.

#1 or #2: Fix, Sell, or Close

Soon after taking charge, Welch set the standard for each business to become the #1 or #2
competitor in its industryâor to disengage. Asked whether this simple notion represented GEâs
strategy, Welch responded, âYou canât set an overall theme or a single strategy for a corporation as
broad as GE.â By 1983, however, Welch had elaborated this general â#1 or #2â objective into a âthree
circle conceptâ of his vision for GE. (See Exhibit 2.) Businesses were categorized as core (with the
priority of âreinvesting in productivity and qualityâ), high-technology (challenged to âstay on the
leading edgeâ by investing in R&D), and services (required to âadd outstanding people and make
contiguous acquisitionsâ). To a question about what he hoped to build at GE, Welch replied:

A decade from now, I would like General Electric to be perceived as a unique, high-
spirited, entrepreneurial enterprise . . . the most profitable, highly diversified company on
earth, with world quality leadership in every one of its product lines.1

But as GE managers struggled to build #1 or #2 positions in a recessionary environment and
under attack from globalâoften Japaneseâcompetitors, Welchâs admonition to âfix, sell, or closeâ
uncompetitive businesses frequently led to the latter options. Scores of businesses were sold,
including central air-conditioning, housewares, coal mining, and, eventually, even GEâs well-known
consumer electronics business. Between 1981 and 1990, GE freed up over $11 billion of capital by
selling off more than 200 businesses, which had accounted for 25% of 1980 sales. In that same time
frame, the company made over 370 acquisitions, investing more than $21 billion in such major
purchases as Westinghouseâs lighting business, Employers Reinsurance, RCA, Kidder Peabody, and
Thomson/CGR, the French medical imaging company. (See Exhibit 3.)

GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership 399-150

Internally, Welchâs insistence that GE become more âlean and agileâ resulted in a highly
disciplined destaffing process aimed at all large headquarters groups, including a highly symbolic
50% reduction in the 200-person strategic planning staff. Welch described his motivation:

We donât need the questioners and checkers, the nitpickers who bog down the process. . . .
Today, each staff person has to ask, âHow do I add value? How do I make people on the line
more effective and competitive?â2

As he continued to chip away at bureaucracy, Welch next scrapped GEâs laborious strategic
planning systemâand with it, the remaining corporate planning staff. He replaced it with âreal time
planningâ built around a five-page strategy playbook, which Welch and his 14 key business heads
discussed in shirtsleeves sessions âunencumbered by staff.â Each businessâs playbook provided
simple one-page answers to five questions concerning current market dynamics, the competitorsâ key
recent activities, the GE business response, the greatest competitive threat over the next three years,
and the GE businessâs planned response.

The budgeting process was equally radically redefined. Rather than documenting internally
focused comparisons with past performance, results were now evaluated against external
competitively based criteria: Do sales show increases in market share, for example? Do margins
indicate a cost advantage compared with competition?

In 1985, Welch eliminated the sector level, previously the powerful center of strategic control. (See
Exhibits 4a and 4b.) By reducing the number of hierarchical levels from nine to as few as four, Welch
ensured that all businesses reported directly to him. He said:

We used to have department managers, sector managers, subsector managers, unit
managers, supervisors. Weâre driving those titles outâ¦ We used to go from the CEO to sectors
to groups to businesses. Now we go from the CEO to businesses. There is nothing else. Zero.3

Through downsizing, destaffing, and delayering, GE eliminated 59,290 salaried and 64,160 hourly
positions between 1981 and 1988; divestiture eliminated an additional 122,700. Even when offset by
the acquisitions, the number of employees at GE declined from 404,000 in 1980 to 330,000 by 1984 and
292,000 by 1989. Between 1981 and 1985, revenues increased modestly from $27.2 billion to $29.2
billion, but operating profits rose dramatically from $1.6 billion to $2.4 billion. This set the base for
strong increases in both sales and earnings in the second half of the decade (see Exhibit 5).

This drastic restructuring in the early- and mid-1980s earned Welch the nickname âNeutron Jack,â
a term that gained currency even among GE managers when the CEO replaced 12 of his 14 business
heads in August 1986. Welchâs new âvarsity teamâ consisted of managers with a strong commitment
to the new management values, a willingness to break with the old GE culture, and most of all, an
ability to take charge and bring about change. Despite his great dislike for a nickname he felt he did
not deserve, Welch kept pushing the organization for more change. The further into the restructuring
he got, the more convinced he became of the need for bold action:

For me, the idea is to shun the incremental and go for the leapâ¦ How does an institution
know when the pace is about right? I hope you wonât think Iâm being melodramatic if I say
that the institution ought to stretch itself, ought to reach, to the point where it almost comes
ungluedâ¦ Remember the theory that a manager should have no more than 6 or 7 direct
reports? I say the right number is closer to 10 or 15.4

399-150 GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership

The Late 1980s: Second Stage of the Rocket

By the late 1980s, most of GEâs business restructuring was complete, but the organization was still
reeling from culture shock and management exhaustion. Welch was as eager as anyone in GE to
move past the âNeutron-Jackâ stage and begin rebuilding the company on its more solid foundations.

The âSoftwareâ Initiatives: Work-Out and Best Practices

Years after launching GEâs massive restructuring effort, Welch concluded, âBy mid-1988 the
hardware was basically in place. We liked our businesses. Now it was time to focus on the
organizationâs software.â He also acknowledged that his priorities were shifting: âA company can
boost productivity by restructuring, removing bureaucracy and downsizing, but it cannot sustain
high productivity without cultural change.â

In 1989, Welch articulated the management style he hoped to make GEâs normâan approach
based on openness, candor, and facing reality. Simultaneously, he refined the core elements of the
organizational culture he wanted to createâone characterized by speed, simplicity, and self-

confidence.a Over the next few years, he launched two closely linked initiativesâdubbed Work-Out
and Best Practicesâaimed at creating the desired culture and management approach.

In late 1988, during one of Welchâs regular visits to teach in the companyâs Management
Development Institute, he engaged a group of GE managers in a particularly outspoken session about
the difficulty they were having implementing change back at their operations. In a subsequent
discussion with James Baughman, GEâs director of management development, Welch wondered how
to replicate this type of honest, energetic interaction throughout the company. His objective was to
create the culture of a small companyâa place where all felt engaged and everyone had voice.
Together, they developed the idea of a forum where employees could not only speak their minds
about how their business might be run more effectively, but also get immediate responses to their
ideas and proposals. By the time their helicopter touched down at GEâs headquarters, Welch and
Baughman had sketched out a major change initiative they called âWork-Outââa process designed
to get unnecessary bureaucratic work out of the system while providing a forum in which employees
and their bosses could work out new ways of dealing with each other.

At Welchâs request, Baughman formed a small implementation team and, with the help of two
dozen outside consultants, led the company-wide program rollout. Assigned to one of GEâs
businesses, each consultant facilitated a series of off-site meetings patterned after the open-forum
style of New England town meetings. Groups of 40 to 100 employees were invited to share views
about their business and how it might be improved. The three-day sessions usually began with a talk
by the unit boss, who presented a challenge and a broad agenda. Then, the boss was asked to leave,
allowing employees aided by facilitators to list their problems, debate solutions, and prepare
presentations. On the final day, the bosses returned and were asked to listen to their employeesâ
analyses and recommendations. The rules of the process required managers to make instant, on-the-

a Interestingly, Welchâs first attempts at articulating and communicating GEâs new cultural values were awkward. For
example, in 1986 he defined 10 desirable cultural âattitudes and policiesâ which few in GE could remember, let alone practice.
Furthermore, he communicated his new organizational model as the GE Business Engine, a concept that many found
depersonalizing since it seemed to depict people as inputs into a financial machine. Gradually, Welch became more
comfortable articulating cultural values which he continued to refine into what he termed âGEâs social architecture.â
Eventually his concept of The Business Engine evolved to become The Human Engine.

GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership 399-150

spot decisions about each proposal, in front of everyone to 80% of proposals. If the manager needed
more information, he or she had to charter a team to get it by an agreed-upon decision date.

Armand Lauzon, a manager at a GE Aircraft Engine factory, described to Fortune how he felt as
his employees presented him with their suggestions in a room where they had carefully arranged the
seating so his boss was behind him. âI was wringing wet within half an hour,â he said. âThey had 10

proposals; I had about a minute to say yes or no to each one. And I couldnât make eye contact with
my boss without turning around, which would show everyone in the room I was chickenshit.â In
total, Lauzon supported all but eight of the 108 proposals.

By mid-1992, over 200,000 GE employeesâover two-thirds of the workforceâhad participated in
Work-Out, although the exact number was hard to determine, since Welch insisted that none of the
meetings be documented. âYouâre just going to end up with more bureaucracy,â he said. What was
clear, however, was that productivity increases, which had been growing at an average annual rate of

2% between 1981 and 1987, doubled to a 4% annual rate between 1988 and 1992.b

As Work-Out was getting started, Welchâs relentless pursuit of ideas to increase productivity
resulted in the birth of a related movement called Best Practices. In the summer of 1988, Welch gave
Michael Frazier of GEâs Business Development department a simple challenge: How can we learn
from other companies that are achieving higher productivity growth than GE? Frazier selected nine
companies, including Ford, Hewlett Packard, Xerox, and Toshiba, with different best practices to
study. In addition to specific tools and practices, Frazierâs team also identified several characteristics
common to the successful companies: they focused more on developing effective processes than
controlling individual activities; customer satisfaction was their main gauge of performance; they
treated their suppliers as partners; and they emphasized the need for a constant stream of high-
quality new products designed for efficient manufacturing.

On reviewing Frazierâs report, Welch became an instant convert and committed to a major new
training program to introduce Best Practices thinking throughout the organization, integrating it into
the ongoing agenda of Work-Out teams. As a result of the Best Practices program, many GE
managers began to realize they were managing and measuring the wrong things. (Said one, âWe
should have focused more on how things get done than on just what got done.â) Subsequently, several
units began radically revising their whole work approach. For example, the head of the corporate
audit staff explained: âWhen I started 10 years ago, the first thing I did was count the $5,000 in the
petty cash box. Today, we look at the $5 million in inventory on the floor, searching for process
improvements that will bring it down.â

Going Global

During the early- and mid-1980s, internationalization had remained a back-burner issue at GE,
but strong advocates of globalization such as Paolo Fresco, the Italian-born president of GE Europe,
understood why Welch had to concentrate his early efforts on the rationalization of the U.S.
operations. âItâs very difficult to jump into the world arena if you donât have a solid base at home,â
said Fresco, âbut once the solid base was created, we really took the jump.â

The first rumblings of the emerging globalization priority came in Welchâs challenges to his
Corporate Executive Council meetings during 1986. Reflecting his own early experience in GE

b In GE, productivity was defined by the following calculation: Productivity = Real Revenue (net of price increases)/Real Costs
(net of inflationary increases).

399-150 GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership

Plastics, he did not try to impose a corporate globalization strategy, preferring to let each business
take responsibility for implementing a plan appropriate to its particular needs:

When I was 29 years old I bought land in Holland and built the plants there. That was âmy
landâ for âmy business.â I was never interested in the global GE, just the global Plastics
business. The idea of a company being global is nonsense. Businesses are global, not
companies.5

This did not mean, however, that Welch was uninvolved in his business managersâ globalization
plans. In 1987, he focused their attention by raising the bar on GEâs well-known performance
standard: from now on, â#1 or #2â was to be evaluated on world market position. As if to underline
his seriousness, a few months later he announced a major deal with Thomson S.A., in which GE
agreed to exchange its struggling consumer electronics business for the large French electronics
companyâs medical imaging business, a business in which GE had a leading global position.

To provide continuing momentum to the internationalization effort, in 1989 Welch appointed
Paolo Fresco as head of International Operations and in 1992 made him a vice-chairman and member
of his four-man corporate executive office. Fresco, a key negotiator on the Thomson swap, continued
to broker numerous international deals: a joint venture with German-based Robert Bosch, a
partnership with Toshiba, and the acquisition of Sovac, the French consumer credit company. As
Eastern Europe opened, he initiated a major thrust into the former Communist bloc, spearheaded by
the purchase of a majority share in the Hungarian lighting company, Tungsram. Fresco became the
locator and champion of new opportunities. âI fill vacuums,â he said. âAll these assignments are
temporaryâonce they are complete, I get out of the way.â

Like subsequent strategic initiatives, globalization was not a one-time effort, but an ongoing
theme that Welch doggedly pursued over the years. Taking advantage of Europeâs economic
downturn, GE invested $17.5 billion in the region between 1989 and 1995, half on new plants and
facilities and half to finance 50 or so acquisitions. Then, in 1995, after the Mexican peso collapsed, the
company again saw the economic uncertainty as a great buying opportunity. Within six months GE
had acquired 16 companies, positioning it to participate in the countryâs surprisingly rapid recovery.
And as Asia slipped into crisis in 1997-1998, Welch urged his managers to view it as a buying
opportunity rather than a problem. In Japan alone the company spent $15 billion on acquisitions in
six months.

By 1998, international revenues were $42.8 billion, almost double the level just five years earlier.
The company expected to do almost half its business outside the United States by 2000, compared
with only 20% in 1985, the year before the first international push. More important, global revenues
were growing at almost three times the rate of domestic sales. (See Exhibit 6).

Developing Leaders

While the global thrust and the new cultural initiatives were being implemented, Welch was also
focusing on the huge task of realigning the skill setsâand, more important, the mindsetsâof the
companyâs 290,000 employees with GEâs new strategic and organizational imperatives. Amidst the
grumbling of those who felt overworked in the new demanding environment and the residual
distrust left over from the layoffs of the 1980s, he recognized his challenge was nothing short of
redefining the implicit contract that GE had with its employees:

GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership 399-150

Like many other large companies in the U.S., Europe and Japan, GE has had an implicit
psychological contract based on perceived lifetime employment. This produced a paternal,
feudal, fuzzy kind of loyalty. That kind of loyalty tends to focus people inward. But in todayâs
environment, peopleâs emotional energy must be focused outward on a competitive worldâ¦
The new psychological contract, if there is such a thing, is that jobs at GE are the best in the
world for people willing to compete. We have the best training and development resources
and an environment committed to providing opportunities for personal and professional
growth.6

Like all GE managers, Welch grew up in an organization deeply committed to developing its
people. He wanted to harness that tradition and use it to translate his broad cultural changes down to
the individual level. This would mean adapting GEâs well-established human resource systems to his
goals. For example, for as long as he could remember, the companyâs top executives had committed
substantial amounts of time to the rigorous management appraisal, development, and succession
planning reviews known as Session C. He began using this process to help achieve his objectives,
predictably adding his own intense personal style to its implementation.

Starting in April and lasting through May each year, Welch and three of his senior executives
visited each of his businesses to review the progress of the companyâs top 3,000 executives. Welch
kept particularly close tabs on the upper 500, all of whom had been appointed with his personal
approval. In these multi-day meetings, Welch wanted to be exposed to high-potential managers
presenting results on major projects. In an exhaustive 10- to 12-hour review in each business, Welch
asked the top executive to identify the future leaders, outline planned training and development
plans, and detail succession plans for all key jobs. The exercise reflected his strong belief that good
people were GEâs key assets and had to be managed as a company resource. âI own the people,â he
told his business heads. âYou just rent them.â

As these reviews rolled out through GE, all professional-level employees expected honest
feedback about where they were professionally, reasonable expectations about future positions they
could hold, and the specific skills required to get there. Managers at every level used these
discussions as the basis for coaching and developing their staff. (As a role model, Welch estimated he
spent at least 70% of his time on people issues, most of that teaching and developing others.)

A strong believer in incentives, Welch also radically overhauled GEâs compensation package.
From a system driven by narrow-range increases in base salary supplemented by bonuses based on
oneâs business performance, he implemented a model in which stock options became the primary
component of management compensation. He expanded the number of options recipients from 300 to
30,000 and began making much more aggressive bonus awards and options allocations strongly tied
to the individualâs performance on the current program priority (globalization, for example, or best
practices initiatives).

Through all of these human resource tools and processes, Welchâs major effort was increasingly
focused on creating an environment in which people could be their best. Entering the 1990s, he
described his objective for GE in these terms:

Ten years from now, we want magazines to write about GE as a place where people have
the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody. An open, fair place
where people have a sense that what they do matters, and where that sense of accomplishment
is rewarded in the pocketbook and the soul. That will be our report card.

399-150 GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership
8

A key institution that Welch harnessed to bring about this cultural change was GEâs Crotonville
management development facility. Welch wanted to convert Crotonville from its management
training focus and its role as a reward or a consolation prize for those who missed out on a
promotion to a powerful engine of change in his transformation effort. In the mid-1980s, when he
was cutting costs almost everywhere else, he spent $45 million on new buildings and improvements
at Crotonville. He also hired some experienced academicsâJim Baughman from Harvard and Noel
Tichy from Michiganâto revolutionize Crotonvilleâs activities.

Under Welchâs direct control and with his personal involvement, Crotonvilleâs priority became to
develop a generation of leaders aligned to GEâs new vision and cultural norms. Increasingly, it
evolved from a training center to a place where teams of managers worked together on real priority
issues and decided on results-oriented action. And this led to the gradual replacement of outside
faculty by GE insiders acting as discussion leaders. Leading the change was Welch, who twice a
month traveled to Crotonville to teach and interact with GE employees. (âHavenât missed a session
yet,â he boasted in the late 1990s.) (See Exhibit 7.) It was during one of these sessions that the idea for
Work-Out emerged, and it was at Crotonville that many of the Best Practices sessions were held.

Despite all the individual development and the corporate initiatives, not all managers were able to
achieve Welchâs ideal leadership profile. (See Exhibit 8.) Of greatest concern to the CEO were those
who seemed unwilling or unable to embrace the open, participative values he was espousing. In
1991, he addressed the problem and the seriousness of its consequences:

In our view, leaders, whether on the shop floor or at the top of our businesses, can be
characterized in at least four ways. The first is one who delivers on commitmentsâfinancial or
otherwiseâand shares the values of our company. His or her future is an easy call. Onward
and upward. The second type of leader is one who does not meet commitments and does not
share our values. Not as pleasant a call, but equally easy. The third is one who misses
commitments but shares the values. He or she usually get a second chance, preferably in a
different environment.

Then thereâs the fourth typeâthe most difficult for many of us to deal with. That leader
delivers on commitments, makes all the numbers, but doesnât share the values we must have.
This is the individual who typically forces performance out of people rather than inspires it:
the autocrat, the big shot, the tyrant. Too often all of us have looked the other way and
tolerated these âType 4â managers because âthey always deliverââat least in the short term. 7

To reinforce his intention to identify and weed out Type 4 managers, Welch began rating GE top-
level managers not only on their performance against quantifiable targets but also on the extent to
which they âlivedâ GE values. Subsequently, many of GEâs 500 officers started using a similar two-
dimensional grid to evaluate and coach their own direct reports. And when coaching failed, Welch
was prepared to take action on the type 4s. âPeople are removed for having the wrong values,â he
insisted. âWe donât even talk about the numbers.â

To back up this commitment to the new leadership criteria, a few years later GE introduced a 360Â°
feedback process. Every employee was graded by his or her manager, peers and all subordinates on a
1 to 5 scale in areas such as teambuilding, quality focus, and vision. Welch described it as a powerful
tool for detecting and changing those who âsmile up and kick down.â Tied into the evaluation
process and linked to the Session C human resource planning exercise, the 360Â° feedback became the
means for identifying training needs, coaching opportunities, and, eventually, career planningâ
whether that be up, sideways, or out.

GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership 399-150

Into the 1990s: The Third Wave

Entering the 1990s, Welch felt that GEâs new foundation had been laid. Despite the slowdown in
the industrial sector in the first few years of the new decade, he was committed to the task of
rebuilding the company at an even more urgent pace. The new initiatives rolled on.

Boundaryless Behavior

Moving beyond the earlier initiatives aimed at strengthening GEâs individual businesses, Welch
began to focus on creating what he called âintegrated diversity.â He articulated his vision for GE in
the 1990s as a âboundarylessâ company, one characterized by an âopen, anti-parochial environment,
friendly toward the seeking and sharing of new ideas, regardless of their originsââin many ways an
institutionalization of the openness âWork-Outâ had initiated and âbest practicesâ transfers had
reinforced. Describing his barrier-free vision for GE, Welch wrote:

The boundaryless company we envision will remove the barriers among engineering,
manufacturing, marketing, sales, and customer service; it will recognize no distinctions
between domestic and foreign operationsâweâll be as comfortable doing business in Budapest
and Seoul as we are in Louisville and Schenectady. A boundaryless organization will ignore or
erase group labels such as âmanagement,â âsalariedâ or âhourly,â which get in the way of
people working together.8

One of Welchâs most repeated stories of how best practices could be leveraged by boundaryless
behavior described how managers from Canadian GE identified a small New Zealand appliance
maker, Fisher & Paykel, producing a broad range of products very efficiently in its small, low-volume
plant. When the Canadians used the flexible job-shop techniques to increase productivity in their
high-volume factory, the U.S. appliance business became interested. More than 200 managers and
employees from the Louisville plant went to Montreal to study the accomplishments, and soon a
Quick Response program had cut the U.S. production cycle in half and reduced inventory costs by
20%. Not surprisingly, GEâs Appliance Park in Louisville became a âmust seeâ destination for many
other businesses, and within a year, the program had been adapted for businesses as diverse as
locomotives and jet engines.

The CEO gave the abstract concept of boundarylessness teeth not only by repeating such success
stories but also by emphasizing that there was no place at GE for the adherents of the old culture:
âWe take people who arenât boundaryless out of jobs. . . If youâre turf-oriented, self-centered, donât
share with people and arenât searching for ideas, you donât belong here,â he said. He also changed
the criteria for bonuses and options awards to reward idea-seeking and sharing, not just idea
creation. Five years later, Welch had a list of boundarylessness success stories:

We quickly began to learn from each other: productivity solutions from Lighting; âquick
responseâ asset management from Appliances; transaction effectiveness from GE Capital; cost-
reduction techniques from Aircraft Engines; and global account management from Plastics.9

One of the most impressive examples of the way ideas and expertise spread throughout GE was
the companyâs âintegration model.â Developed on the lessons drawn from literally hundreds of post-
acquisition reviews, the model guided the actions of managers in any part of the company
responsible for integrating a newly acquired operation: from taking control of the accounts to
realigning the organization, and from identifying and removing âblockersâ to implementing GE tools
and programs. By the late 1990s, GEâs integration programs were completed in about 100 days.

399-150 GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership

Stretch: Achieving the Impossible

To reinforce his rising managerial expectations, in the early 1990s Welch made a new assault on
GEâs cultural norms. He introduced the notion of âstretchâ to set performance targets and described
it as âusing dreams to set business targets, with no real idea of how to get there.â10 His objective was
to change the way targets were set and performance was measured by creating an atmosphere that
asked of everyone, âHow good can you be?â

Stretch targets did not replace traditional forecasting and objective-setting processes. Managers
still had to hit basic targetsâadjusted to recognize the world as it turned out to be, not some rigid
plan negotiated a year earlier. But during the budget cycle they were also required to set higher,
âstretchâ goals for their businesses. While managers were not held accountable for these goals, those
who achieved them were rewarded with substantial bonuses or stock options. Said Welch: âRigorous
budgeting alone is nonsense. I think in terms of . . . what is the best you can do. You soon begin to see
what comes out of a trusting, open environment.â

Within a year of introducing the concept of stretch, Welch was reporting progress:

We used to timidly nudge the peanut along, setting goals of moving from, say, 4.73 in
inventory turns to 4.91, or from 8.53% operating margin to 8.92%; and then indulge in time-
consuming high-level, bureaucratic negotiations to move the number a few hundredths one
way or the other. . . We donât do that anymore. In a boundaryless organization with a bias for
speed, decimal points are a bore. They inspire or challenge no one, capture no imaginations.
Weâre aiming at 10 inventory turns, at 15% operating margins.

By the mid-1990s, stretch goals were an established part of GEâs culture. A senior executive
explained: âPeople like problem solving. They want to go to that next level. Thatâs becoming a bigger
driver for the company than Work-Out.â But the introduction of stretch targets did not come without
implementation difficulties. According to Steve Kerr, the head of Crotonville, âYou absolutely have
to honor the donât-punish-failure concept; stretch targets become a disaster without that.â Unless
properly managed, he explained, stretch could easily degenerate into a justification for forcing people
to work 60-hour weeks to achieve impossible goals. âItâs not the number per se, especially because itâs
a made-up number. Itâs the process youâre trying to stimulate. Youâre trying to get people to think of
fundamentally better ways of performing their work.â

In early 1996, Welch acknowledged that GE did not meet two of its four-year corporate stretch
targets: to increase operating margins from their 1991 level of 10% to 15% by 1995, and inventory
turns from 5 to 10 times. However, after decades of single-digit operating margins and inventory
turns of 4 or 5, GE did achieve an operating margin of 14.4% and inventory turns of almost 7 in 1995.
âIn stretching for these âimpossibleâ targets,â said Welch, âwe learned to do things faster than we
would have going after âdoableâ goals, and we have enough confidence now to set new stretch targets
of at least 16% operating margin and more than 10 turns by 1998.â

Service Businesses

In 1994, Welch launched a new strategic initiative designed to reinforce one of his earliest goals: to
reduce GEâs dependence on its traditional industrial products. In the early 1980s, he had initiated the
initial tilt towards service businesses through the acquisition of financial service companies such as
Employers Reinsurance and Kidder, Peabody. âNearly 60% of GEâs profits now comes from
services,â said Welch in 1995. âUp from 16.4% in 1980. I wish it were 80%.â

GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership 399-150
11

To fulfill that wish, Welch began moving to the next stageâa push for product services. During
his annual strategic reviews with senior managers, Welch began to challenge his managers âto
participate in more of the food chain.â While customers would always need high-quality hardware,
Welch argued that GEâs future challenge would be to offset slowing growth for its products by
supplementing them with added-value services. Describing it as one of âthe biggest growth
opportunities in [GEâs] history,â he named a cadre of rising executives to focus on the issue. At the
same time, he asked Vice Chairman Paolo Fresco to set up a Services Council through which top
managers could exchange ideas.

Soon, all GEâs businesses were exploring new service-based growth opportunities. The medical
business, for example, developed a concept called âIn Site.â This involved placing diagnostic sensors
and communications capability into their installed base of CT scanners, MRI equipment, and other
GE medical devices. The system linked the equipment directly to GEâs on-line service center,
continuously diagnosing its operating condition in real time. Soon, GE was offering its remote
diagnostics and other services to all medical equipmentâincluding non-GE products.

Like other internal âbest practiceâ service examples, the âIn Siteâ story was shared in the Services
Council, and soon online diagnostic technology was being transferred to other GE businesses. In
Aircraft Engines, critical operating parameters of GE jet engines were monitored by GE Service
experts while the engines were in flight, providing the company with a major value-added benefit for
its customers. The same-real time diagnostic concepts were also applied in GEâs power systems
business, and other businesses had plans to develop remote diagnostic capability as well.

According to Welch, the opportunity for growth in product services was unlimited. With an
advantage unique in the worldâan installed base of some 9,000 GE commercial jet engines, 10,000
turbines, 13,000 locomotives, and 84,000 major pieces of medical diagnostic imaging equipmentâhe
felt GE had an incredibly strong platform on which to build. Commented Lewis Edelheit, GEâs senior
VP for Corporate Research and Development:

A few years ago, businesses were seen as a pyramid, with the base as the product and the
other elementsâservices, manufacturing processes and informationâresting on that base. We
are now looking at turning the pyramid upside down. The product will become just one piece
of the pictureâthe tip of that inverted pyramid. The biggest growth opportunities may come
from providing services to the customer: providing the customer with ways to become more
productiveâand with information so valuable the customer will pay for it.

By 1996, GE had built an $8 billion equipment services business, which was growing much faster
than the underlying product businesses. Equally important, in Welchâs view, it was changing internal
mindsets from selling products to âhelping our customers to win.â GEâs product services were to be
aimed at making customersâ existing assetsâpower plants, locomotives, airplanes, factories, hospital
equipment and the likeâmore productive. Yet while GE was helping its customers reduce their
capital outlays, its managers were also shifting demand from low-margin products to their newer
high-profit services with margins almost twice the company average.

This initiative led to a new round of acquisitions. In 1997 alone, GE made 20 service-related
acquisitions and joint ventures, including a $1.5 billion acquisition of a jet engine service business and
the $600 million purchase of a global power generation equipment service company. GEâs radical
business shift over two decades led Welch to claim, âWe have changed the very nature of what we do
for a living. Today, services account for two-thirds of our revenues.â (See Exhibit 9.)

399-150 GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership
12

Closing Out the Decade: Raising the Bar

As he entered the last half of the decade, Welch was aware that he would reach GEâs mandatory
retirement age in 2001. Yet his commitment to keep building GE was undiminished, despite critics
who continued to question if the company could keep adding value to such a highly diversified
business portfolio. In the 1995 Annual Report, he tackled the issue head on:

The hottest trend in business is the rush toward breaking up multi-business companies. The
obvious question to GE, the worldâs largest multi-business company, was, âWhen are you
going to do it?â The short answer is that weâre not. . . . We are a company intent on getting
bigger, not smaller. Our only answer to the trendy question âWhat do you intend to spin off?â
is âCashâand lots of it.â

Despite hospitalization for triple bypass surgery in 1995, he showed no signs of slowing down.
Indeed, many felt he gained new energy in his post-operative state as the pressure for performance
and new initiatives continued.

Six Sigma Quality Initiative

When a 1995 company survey showed that GE employees were dissatisfied with the quality of its
products and processes, Welch met with Lawrence Bossidy, an old friend who had left GE in 1991 to
become CEO of AlliedSignal Inc. Welch learned how the Six Sigma quality program Bossidy had
borrowed from Motorola Inc. had helped AlliedSignal dramatically improve quality, lower costs, and
increase productivity. Immediately, he invited Bossidy to GEâs next Corporate Executive Council
meeting. His presentation of the AlliedSignal program won universal rave reviews.

After the meeting, Welch asked Gary Reiner, vice president for Business Development, to lead a
quality initiative for GE. Reiner undertook a detailed study of the impact of quality programs at
companies like Motorola and AlliedSignal. His analysis concluded that GE was operating at error
rates ten thousand times the Six Sigma quality level of 3.4 defects per million operations.
Furthermore, he estimated that the gap was costing the company between $8 billion and $12 billion a
year in inefficiencies and lost productivity. On the basis of Reinerâs findings, at GEâs 1996 annual
gathering of its 500 top managers in Boca Raton, Welch announced a goal of reaching Six Sigma
quality levels company-wide by the year 2000, describing the program as âthe biggest opportunity
for growth, increased profitability, and individual employee satisfaction in the history of our
company.â

Like all initiatives announced in Boca (services, globalization, etc.), Six Sigma quality was more
than a slogan: it was a well-developed program, with a detailed plan for its implementation.
Furthermore, it would be monitored throughout the year in a carefully linked series of management
meetings that Welch started to refer to as GEâs âoperating systemââthe series of planning, resource
allocation, review, and communication meetings that were at the heart of its management process.
The Boca initiative announcement was followed up by a first progress report at the two-day March
CEC meeting; then in the April Session C reviews, Welch would check how key human resources had
been deployed against the target; the July strategic review sessions would review the impact of the
initiative on each businessâs three-year outlook; Octoberâs Officers Meeting tracked progress and
showcased best practice; and the November operating plan reviews would fold the impact into the
following yearâs forecasts. (See Exhibit 10.) Said Welch, âWe are relentless.â

GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership 399-150
13

Six Sigma participation was not optional, and Welch tied 40% of bonus to an individualâs Six
Sigma objectives. To provide managers the skills, Reiner designed a massive training of thousands of
managers to create a cadre of âGreen Belts,â âBlack Belts,â and âMaster Black Beltsâ in Six Sigma
quality. âGreen Beltâ training took about four weeks, followed by implementation of a five-month
project aimed at improving quality. Black Belts required six weeks of instruction in statistics, data
analysis, and other Six Sigma tools which prepared the candidate to undertake three major quality
projects that resulted in measurable performance increases. Master Black Beltsâfull-time Six Sigma
instructorsâmentored the Black Belt candidates through the two-year process.

At the January 1998 Boca Raton meeting, speakers from across the company and around the world
presented Six Sigma best practice and achievements. Managers from Medical Systems described how
Six Sigma designs produced a tenfold increase in the life of CT scanner x-ray tubes; the railcar leasing
business described a 62% reduction in turnaround time at its repair shops, making it two to three
times faster than its nearest rival; and a team from the plastics business described how the Six Sigma
process added 300 million pounds of new capacity, equivalent to a âfree plant.â In all, 30,000 Six
Sigma projects had been initiated in the prior year.

At the April 1999 Annual Meeting, Welch announced that in the first two years of Six Sigma, GE
had invested $500 million to train the entire professional workforce of 85,000. In addition, 5,000
managers had been appointed to work on the program full-time as Black Belts and Master Black
Belts, leading Welch to claim âthey have begun to change the DNA of GE to one whose central strand
is quality.â Returns of $750 million over the investment exceeded expectations, and the company was
forecasting additional returns of $1.5 billion in 1999 (Exhibit 11). Clearly delighted by the program,
Welch stated, âIn nearly four decades with GE, I have never seen a company initiative move so
willingly and so rapidly in pursuit of a big idea.â

âA Playersâ with âFour Eâsâ

The closer he got to his planned retirement date, the more Welch seemed to focus on the quality of
the organization he would leave to his successor. While he felt he had assembled a first-class team of
leaders at the top of the company, he wanted to continue upgrading quality deep in the organization.
This implied not only raising the bar on new hires but also weeding out those who did not meet GEâs
high standards. Modifying his earlier language of four management types, he began describing GE as
a company that wanted only âA Playersââindividuals with vision, leadership, energy, and courage.
He described what he was trying to achieve:

The GE leader sees this company for what it truly is: the largest petri dish of business
innovation in the world. We have roughly 350 business segments. We see them as 350
laboratories whose ideas are there to be shared, learned, and spread as fast as we can. The
leader sees that sharing and spreading near the top of his or her responsibilities.

âA Playersâ were characterized by what Welch described as the 4Eâsâenergy (âexcited by ideas
and attracted to turbulence because of the opportunity it bringsâ), ability to energize others
(âinfecting everyone with their enthusiasm for an idea and having everyone dreaming the same big
dreamsâ), edge (âthe ability to make tough callsâ) and execution (âthe consistent ability to turn vision
into resultsâ).

To meet the companyâs need for exceptional leadership talent, Welch insisted that GE move to
phase three of its globalization initiative. Beyond focusing on global markets and global sourcesâthe
earlier two phases of globalizationâhe urged his managers to expand their efforts in âglobalizing the

399-150 GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership
14

intellect of the company.â At the same time, he urged his top management group to take strong
action to upgrade the quality of their existing employees:

Weâre an A-plus company. We want only A players. We can get anyone we want. Shame on
any of you who arenât facing into your less-than-the-best. Take care of your best. Reward them.
Promote them. Pay them well. Give them a lot of [stock] options and donât spend all that time
trying to work plans to get Cs to be Bs. Move them on out early. Itâs a contribution.16

To help clarify those decisions, the company implemented a performance appraisal system that
required every manager to rank each of his or her employees into one of five categories based on his
or her long-term performanceâthe âtopâ 10% as 1s, the âstrongâ 15% as 2s, the âhighly valuedâ 50%

as 3s, the âborderlineâ 15% as 4s, and the âleast effectiveâ 10% as 5s.c Every group, even a 10-person
team, had to be ranked on this so-called âvitality curve.â All 1s and most 2s received stock options
but anyone rated a 5 had to go. Welch elaborated on the need to weed out poor performers: âWith the
5s itâs clear as a bell. I think they know it, and you know it. Itâs better for everyone. They go on to a
new place, a new life, a new start.â At the other end of the scale, Welch expected managers to take
action on their top performers to develop them: âYou send your top 10 on and see how many of them
get into the top 10 of the whole business.â

Welch knew that the nurturing and continuously upgrading the quality of management was one
of the main keys to GEâs success. He felt that the talent he amassed over 18 yearsâespecially at the
senior management levelsâwas of a significantly higher quality than in past years. âIâve got all A
players in the Corporate Council. It wasnât like that before. Iâm really pleased about that,â he said.

Toward Retirement: One More Initiative

Just when the organization felt Welch had put his final stamp on GE, at the 1999 Operating
Managersâ Meeting in Boca, the 64-year-old CEO introduced his fourth strategic initiativeâe-

business.d Describing the impact of the Internet as âthe biggest change I have ever seen,â he launched
a program he described as âdestroyyourbusiness.com.â Within two months each unit had a full-time
dyb.com team focused on the challenge of redefining its business model before someone else did.
âChange means opportunity,â he told them. âAnd this is our greatest opportunity yet.â

Yet Welch also knew that GE was late to the Internet party. As he acknowledged in his address to
shareholders three months after the Boca meeting, âBig companies like us were frightened by the
unfamiliarity of the technology. We thought this was mysterious, Nobel Prize stuff, the province of
the wild-eyed and purple haired.â But the more he explored the Internet and talked to people about
it, the more Welch came to believe that, through processes like Six Sigma, GE had done the really
hard work of building the assets needed to support e-businessâlike strong brands, top ranked
product reliability, great fulfillment capability, and excellent service quality. âItâs much harder for a

c Eventually, the five categories were reduced to threeâthe top 20%, the high-performance 70%, and the bottom 10%. The
practice of counseling out the bottom 10% continued under the philosophy of âimprove or move.â

d The three earlier ones were globalization, services, and Six Sigma. For more detail on the implementation of GE’s strategic
initiatives across its business see “GE’s Digital Revolution: Redefining the E in GE” (9-302-001).

GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership 399-150
15

dot com startup to challenge us when they donât have the fundamentals down,â he said. âTheyâre
popcorn stands without a real business or operating capabilities.â

As the organization cranked up to push the new initiative through the monthly schedule of
reviews that GE operating system required, Welch was impressed by early results from the dyb.com
teams. âDigitizing the company and developing e-business models is easierânot harderâthan we
ever imagined,â he said. But others were more sanguine. Said David Mark, a partner at McKinsey
and Co., âItâs going to take a decade for this to play out. I donât think itâs a simple transition.â If Mark
was correct, building GEâs e-business would be a long-term challenge for Welchâs successor.

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GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership 399-150

Exhibit 2 The Three-Circle Visionâ for GE, 1982

SERVICES

GECC Information

Construction

& Engineering

Nuclear

Services

TECHNOLOGY

Industrial Electronics

Medical Systems

Materials

Aerospace

Aircraft Engines

CORE

Lighting

Major Appliance

Motor

Transportation

Turbine

Construction

Equipment

SUPPORT

Ladd Petroleum

Semiconductor

GE Trading Co.

Utah Mining

VENTURES

Calma

OUTSIDE

Housewares

Central Air-Conditioning

TV&Audio

Cable

Mobile

Power Delivery

Radio Stations

Exhibit 3 Changes in the GE Business Portfolio

MAJOR ACQUISITIONS

($21Billion Total)

ï· Calma (CAD/CAM equipment)

ï· Intersil (semiconductors)

ï· Employers Reinsurance Corp.

ï· Decimus (computer leasing)

ï· RCA (NBC Television, aerospace, electronics)

ï· Kidder, Peabody (investment banking)

ï· Polaris (aircraft leasing)

ï· Genstar (container leasing)

ï· Thomson/CGR (medical equipment)

ï· Gelco (portable building leasing)

ï· Borg-Warner Chemicals (plastics)

ï· Montgomery Ward Credit (credit cards)

ï· Roper (appliances)

ï· Penske Leasing (truck leasing)

ï· Financial Guaranty Insurance Co.

ï· Thungsram (light bulbs)

ï· Burton Group Financial Services

ï· Travelers Mortgage (mortgage services)

ï· Thorn Lighting (light bulbs)

ï· Financial News Network (cable network)

ï· Chase Manhattan Leasing

ï· Itel Containers (container leasing)

ï· Harrods/House of Fraser Credit Cards

MAJOR DIVESTITURES

($11 Billion Total)

ï· Central Air Conditioning

ï· Pathfinder Mines

ï· Broadcasting Properties (non-RCA TV &
radio stations)

ï· Utah International (mining)

ï· Housewares (small appliances)

ï· Family Financial Services

ï· RCA Records

ï· Nacolah Life Insurance (RCAâs)

ï· Coronet Carpets (RCAâs)

ï· Consumer Electronics (TV sets)

ï· Carboloy (industrial cutting tools)

ï· NBC Radio Networks

ï· Roper Outdoor Lawn Equipment

ï· GE Solid State (semiconductors)

ï· Calma (CAD/CAM equipment)

ï· RCA Globcomm international telex)

ï· Ladd Petroleum (oil exploration & refining)

ï· RCA Columbia Home Video

ï· Auto Auctions (auctions of used cars)

Source: The Business Engine.

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399-150 GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership

Exhibit 6 Growth through Globalization

$21

$42

$63

$84

$105

199819971996199519911987

Global 15% Average Annual Growth Rate

Domestic 6% Average Annual Growth Rate

Increase in Sales Over

Previous Year

($ millions)

Source: GE Annual Report, 1998.

GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership 399-150

Exhibit 7 Welch at GEâs Crotonville Center

A typical note Welch sent to 30 participants to prepare for his session of GEâs Executive
Development Course (EDC):

Dear EDC Participants,

Iâm looking forward to an exciting time with you tomorrow. Iâve included here a few thoughts for
you to think about prior to our session:

As a groupâ

Situation: Tomorrow you are appointed CEO of GE.

ï· What would you do in first 30 days?

ï· Do you have a current âvisionâ of what to do?

ï· How would you go about developing one?

ï· Present your best shot at a vision.

ï· How would you go about âsellingâ the vision?

ï· What foundations would you build on?

ï· What current practices would you jettison?

Individuallyâ

1. Please be prepared to describe a leadership dilemma that you have faced in the
past 12 months, i.e., plant closing, work transfer, HR, buy or sell a business, etc.

2. Think about what you would recommend to accelerate the Quality drive across
the company.

3. Iâll be talking about âA, B & Câ players. What are your thoughts on just what
makes up such a player?

4. Iâll also be talking about energy/energizing/edge as key characteristics of
todayâs leaders. Do you agree? Would you broaden this? How?

Iâm looking forward to a fun time, and I know Iâll leave a lot smarter than when I arrived.

âJack

Source: The Leadership Engine.

399-150 GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership

Exhibit 8 GE Leadership Capabilities

ï· Create a clear, simple, reality-based,
customer-focused vision and are able to
communicate it straightforwardly to all
constituencies.

ï· Understand accountability and
commitment and are decisive . . . set and
meet aggressive targets . . . always with
unyielding integrity.

ï· Have the self-confidence to empower
others and behave in a boundaryless
fashionâ¦ believe in and are committed to
Work-Out as a means of empowerment . . .
be open to ideas from anywhere.

ï· Have a passion for excellence . . . hate
bureaucracy and all the nonsense that
comes with it.

ï· Have, or have the capacity to develop
global brains and global sensitivity and are
comfortable building diverse global teams.

ï· Stimulate and relish change . . . are not
frightened or paralyzed by it. See change
as opportunity, not just a threat.

ï· Have enormous energy and the ability to
energize and invigorate others.
Understand speed as a competitive
advantage and see the total organizational
benefits that can be derived from a focus
on speed.

Source: 1992 Annual Report.

Exhibit 9 Growth in GEâs Service Businesses

GE Product vs. Services Revenues; 1980-2000

1980

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5545

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2000

(forecast)

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399-150 GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership

Exhibit 11 Costs and Benefits of GEâs Six Sigma Program

Six Sigma Results: 1996-1999

$500

$1,000

$1,500

$2,000

$2,500

1999

Estimate

199819971996

($ millions)

Source: GE Annual Report, 1998.

Benefit Cost

GE’s Two-Decade Transformation: Jack Welch’s Leadership 399-150

Sources and References

Byrne, John A., âJack,â Business Week, June 8, 1998.

Cosco, Joseph P., âGeneral Electric Works it All Out,â Journal of Business Strategy, May-June, 1994.

Filipczak, Bob, âCEOs Who Train,â Training, June, 1996.

Grant, Linda, âGE: The Envelope, Please,â Fortune, June 26, 1995.

Hodgetts, Richard M., âA Conversation with Steve Kerr, GEâs Chief Learning Officer,â Organizational Dynamics,
March 22, 1996.

Kandebo, Stanley, âEngine Services Critical to GE Strategy,â Aviation Week, February 23, 1998.

Koenig, Peter, âIf Europeâs Dead, Why is GE Investing Billions There?â Fortune, September 9, 1996.

Lorenz, Christopher, âThe Alliance-Maker,â Financial Times, April 14, 1989.

Norman, James R., âA Very Nimble Elephant,â Forbes, October 10, 1994.

Rifkin, Glenn, âGE: Brining Good Leaders to Life,â Forbes, April 8, 1996.

Tichy, M. Noel and Eli Cohen, The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders at Every Level
(HarperBusiness, New York, 1997).

Tichy, M. Noel and Eli Cohen, âThe Teaching Organization,â Training & Development, July 1998.

Tichy, M. Noel and Stratford Sherman, Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will (HarperBusiness, New York,
1994).

Tichy, M. Noel and Stratford Sherman, âWalking the Talk at GE,â Training & Development, June 1996.

Slater, Robert, Get Better or Get Beaten! (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1996).

Smart, Tim, âGEâs Brave New World,â Business Week, November 8, 1993.

Stewart, Thomas A., âGE Keeps Those Ideas Coming,â Fortune, August 12, 1991.

Endnotes

1 âGeneral Electric: 1984â (HBS Case No. 385-315), by Professor Francis J. Aguilar and Richard G. Hamermesh

and RA Caroline Brainard. Â© 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
2 Noel Tichy and Ram Charan, âSpeed, Simplicity, Self-Confidence: An Interview with Jack Welch,â Harvard

Business Review, September-October 1989.
3 Anon, âGE Chief Hopes to Shape Agile Giant,â Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1988.
4 Tichy and Charan, op. cit., p. 112.
5 Robert Slater, Jack Welch and the GE Way: Management Insights and Leadership Secrets of the Legendary CEO

(McGraw-Hill), 1998, p. 195.
6 Tichy and Charan, op. cit., p. 120.
7 GE Annual Report, 1991.
8 GE Annual Report, 1989.
9 GE Annual Report, 1995.
10 GE Annual Report, 1993.
11 GE Annual Report, 1993.
12 âStretch Goals: The Dark Side of Asking for Miracles,â interview excerpts with Steve Kerr, GEâs Vice President

of Leadership Development. Fortune, November 13, 1995.
13 GE Annual Report, 1995.
14 Tim Smart, âJack Welchâs Encore,â Fortune, October 28, 1996.
15 Lewis Edelheit, âGEâs R&D Strategy: Be Vital,â Research Technology Management, March-April, 1998.
16 Slater, op. cit., p. 39.

Running head: BUS463 CASE STUDY 1

BUS463 CASE STUDY 17

BUS463 Case Study

Studentâs Name

California Baptist University

EACH CASE STUDY ASSIGNMENT MUST BE SUBMITTED AS A STAND-ALONE ASSIGNMENT. DO NOT SUBMIT THE PREVIOUS WEEKSâ CASE STUDY ASSIGNMENTS. SUBMITTING ASSIGNMENTS MORE THAN ONCE RESULTS IN A HIGH SAFEASSIGN ORIGINALITY REPORT SCORE.

Evaluate Leadership Decisions

The first leadership concept used wasâ¦The expected outcome(s) of this leadership concept is (are)â¦ THIS IS FILLER TEXT â YOUR WRITING SHOULD BE PLACED IN LIEU OF THIS FILLER TEXT. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin interdum semper sagittis. Aenean felis nibh, fermentum at condimentum sed, tincidunt at lectus. Ut vulputate dictum porta. Nunc venenatis lorem augue, a tempus ligula condimentum sit amet. Proin accumsan tortor sed molestie ultricies. Duis malesuada mi et quam sollicitudin interdum. Sed sed cursus odio, at pulvinar ligula. Proin ornare nibh ut dolor molestie, ac pellentesque orci fringilla. Interdum et malesuada fames ac ante ipsum primis in faucibus. Nulla sit amet fringilla odio. Etiam tempor aliquam purus at ultricies. Sed ultrices justo non imperdiet rhoncus. Nam interdum purus vitae sem tristique, eu tempus justo semper. Integer in cursus neque. Pellentesque faucibus fermentum tortor. Curabitur dictum turpis vitae efficitur auctor.

The second leadership concept used wasâ¦The expected outcome(s) of this leadership concept is (are)â¦ THIS IS FILLER TEXT â YOUR WRITING SHOULD BE PLACED IN LIEU OF THIS FILLER TEXT. Nam dignissim mollis porta. Mauris at faucibus mi. Pellentesque nisi nulla, luctus non vestibulum aliquam, hendrerit et urna. Sed malesuada nulla sem, at bibendum neque convallis et. Ut quis ullamcorper enim. Pellentesque elit metus, fermentum sit amet orci non, lacinia vulputate justo. Ut tincidunt in sem sit amet vulputate.

Nullam ac odio ipsum. Sed consequat ligula eget lectus sodales, in pharetra lacus sagittis. Nam consequat ultrices turpis non porttitor. Duis vehicula iaculis bibendum. Nulla facilisi. Pellentesque faucibus quis mauris eu pulvinar. Suspendisse quis ultrices augue. Fusce vel ligula orci. Duis vel est eleifend, bibendum eros quis, semper magna. Aliquam rutrum porta congue. Nulla lacinia, orci non convallis scelerisque, lorem metus rutrum orci, quis sagittis dui augue id enim. Integer volutpat aliquam justo, sit amet dictum metus venenatis sit amet. Suspendisse molestie risus sed elit ultricies viverra. Ut semper tincidunt urna in tincidunt.

The third leadership concept used wasâ¦The expected outcome(s) of this leadership concept is (are)â¦ THIS IS FILLER TEXT â YOUR WRITING SHOULD BE PLACED IN LIEU OF THIS FILLER TEXT. Nam dignissim mollis porta. Mauris at faucibus mi. Pellentesque nisi nulla, luctus non vestibulum aliquam, hendrerit et urna. Sed malesuada nulla sem, at bibendum neque convallis et. Ut quis ullamcorper enim. Pellentesque elit metus, fermentum sit amet orci non, lacinia vulputate justo. Ut tincidunt in sem sit amet vulputate.

A biblical concept that Welch could have used isâ¦ The expected outcome(s) of this biblical concept is (are)â¦ It is best to include Scripture related to your biblical concept. THIS IS FILLER TEXT â YOUR WRITING SHOULD BE PLACED IN LIEU OF THIS FILLER TEXT. Nam dignissim mollis porta. Mauris at faucibus mi. Pellentesque nisi nulla, luctus non vestibulum aliquam, hendrerit et urna. Sed malesuada nulla sem, at bibendum neque convallis et. Ut quis ullamcorper enim. Pellentesque elit metus, fermentum sit amet orci non, lacinia vulputate justo. Ut tincidunt in sem sit amet vulputate.

Examples of in-text APA formatting:

APA format for a direct quote under 40 words is: (Author’s last name, year of publication, p. x).
APA format for paraphrasing is: (Authorâs last name, year of publication).

Example of a References page:

References
Buckingham, M. (2005). What great managers do. Engineering Management Review, 33(2), 14-25. doi:10.1109/EMR.2005.26742
Butler, T., & Waldroop, J. (1999, September). The art of retaining your best people. Harvard Business Review, 77, 144-152. doi:10.1225/4282
Chapman, G. (n.d.). Understanding the five love languages. Retrieved from Focus on the Family: Retrieved from http://www.focusonthefamily.com/marriage/communication-and-conflict/learn-to-speak-your-spouses-love-language/understanding-the-five-love-languages
Griffin, R. W., & Moorhead, G. (2014). Organizational behavior: Managing people and organizations (11 ed.). Mason, OH: Cengage.
Halvorson, C. (2014, February 6). The ultimate guide to workplace motivation. Retrieved from wheniwork.com: http://wheniwork.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-workplace-motivation/
Lipman, V. (2013, 3 18). 5 easy ways to motivate – and demotivate – employees. Retrieved from www.Forbes.com: http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/03/18/5-easy-ways-to-motivate-and-demotivate-employees/
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classis definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, 54-67. doi:10.1006/ceps.199.1020
Sultan, S. (2012). Examining the job characteristics: A matter of employees’ work motivation and job satisfaction. Journal of Behavioural Sciences, 22(2), 13-25.

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Thorough Proofreading

We thoroughly read your final draft to identify errors.

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Areas of Expertise

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Trusted Partner of 9650+ Students for Writing

Preferred Writer

Grammar Check Report

One Page Summary

Plagiarism Report

Free Features $66FREE

Our Services

Academic Writing

Professional Editing

Thorough Proofreading

Thorough Proofreading

Delegate Your Challenging Writing Tasks to Experienced Professionals

Check Out Our Sample Work

It May Not Be Much, but It’s Honest Work!

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Happy Clients

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Words Written This Week

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Ongoing Orders

0%

Customer Satisfaction Rate

Process as Fine as Brewed Coffee

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See How We Helped 9000+ Students Achieve Success

We Analyze Your Problem and Offer Customized Writing

We Mirror Your Guidelines to Deliver Quality Services

We Handle Your Writing Tasks to Ensure Excellent Grades