Straight from the gut - my brief years in Jack Welch's GE

I worked for GE in the late nineties when Jack Welch was at the height of his fame and power. His accomplishments as GE's boss in the latter part of the 20th century are documented widely enough, by him and his many hagiographers. I won't go into them here. 

When I entered GE, I came into a world where process rigor was the corporate religion, Jack was a high priest and we were the congregation. I came face-to-face instantly with an intensely competitive world where the rules of the game were determined by the tyranny of the 9-blocker rank-and-yank practice. I witnessed colleagues turning against each other viciously in annual reviews where each of us knew we had to let some members of our teams go, and no one wanted to admit that their teams had more bottom-fivers who deserved to be hit with the eject button. I was drafted into the six-sigma fever that had everyone in the company spending colossal amounts of employee hours on useless projects. Jack had made six-sigma training and project work a necessary condition for being considered for a promotion. For the first time in my career, I confronted the jarring reality of a world where people would be "disappeared" overnight for missing a quarter.

GE Capital, which I was a part of, was run by an eccentric gent whom Jack tolerated merely because it was a cash generator. Indeed, GE Capital enabled Jack to perfect the legerdemain of delivering on his forecasts to Wall Street quarter after quarter, year after year; a gravity-defying achievement that may have well been possible only through the creative but perfectly legal accounting practices of GE Capital. Jack was even reputed to have challenged his accountants repeatedly with the question: show me where it says I can't do it.

Jack's anointment as the CEO of the century (beating out the Henry Fords, Alfred Sloans and the like) may have been as much due to recency bias as to his achievements. When Jack left the building, carrying a $ 417 M exit package, six-sigma fever mercifully left through the service entrance. The company had other issues on its hands and struggled to find success with many high-profile initiatives (does anyone remember an electronic health record platform named Qualibria ?) and it's a matter of conjecture whether they were Jack's legacy, although he had gone on record expressing doubts about his choice of successor for GE.

Through all this, Jack continued to speak and write on his management philosophy well into the current century, oblivious to how out of touch his prescriptions sounded in a new internet era where companies in Silicon Valley were wooing and nurturing talent in ways very different from the way GE treated its own people in the 20th century. An era in which millennial workers were increasingly calling the shots, challenging their bosses on corporate social responsibility, and staging walk-outs in defiance of corporate diktat.

I learned much from GE while I was there and am grateful for all of it. Jack's focus on performance instilled a sharpness of focus that I carry with me to this day. I learned that success has much to do with execution rigor which comes from a strong process-oriented culture. I also learned that adherence to process is no substitute for intuition, and consensus decisions often lead to sub-optimal outcomes. His fix-close-or-sell approach to underperforming units taught me that deciding what NOT to do is just as important as choosing to do something. I learned that I needed to control my own destiny or someone else will.

As one of my former colleagues told me recently, Jack Welch's GE is a great place to be from.