In recollecting the legacy of legendary General Electric boss Jack Welch, the company’s current CEO reflected on his most recent visit with the man who many regard among the most influential business leaders in history.
“When I last saw him, what I remember most vividly was when he asked me, ‘So how exactly are you running the company?’” GE CEO Larry Culp Jr. reflected on Monday, in a statement forwarded by GE. “Jack was still in it — committed to GE’s success. And to have Jack Welch ask me how I am running GE is pretty humbling.”
Welch died Sunday of renal failure at age 84, with his imprint on America’s corporate corridors reflected in tributes flooding websites and social media on Monday.
Leading GE during its heyday as a Fairfield-based conglomerate, Welch received the nickname “Neutron Jack” for a zealous drive — ruthless in the eyes of some — to vaporize jobs in the interest of building shareholder value.
But his vision would influence any number more executives, such that in 1999 Fortune magazine awarded Welch the title of manager of the century for shaping how a new generation of corporate boards viewed shaping the value of their enterprises, “in a time of hidebound, formulaic thinking” in Fortune’s words.
Year in and year out during the Welch era, GE would square off with Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company, with Fortune crediting him with recognizing leaps by Japan and Germany in honing the quality of their manufacturing output while controlling costs.
“Welch was hardly the first person to see the new world coming. His great achievement is that having seen it, he faced up to the huge, painful changes it demanded, and made them faster and more emphatically than anyone else in business,” Fortune wrote. “He led managers into this new world, which we still inhabit, and just as important, he showed business people everywhere a method of attacking change of any kind.”
In an interview last year posted by Strayer University, an online program which runs the Jack Welch Management Institute, Welch reflected on his philosophies, both leading the company with a timeline dating back to Thomas Edison and ideas Welch has been building on since.
“This game we’re in is all about self confidence,” Welch said. “And not arrogance — you gotta fight arrogance — but confidence to try things new, to do things that you wouldn’t have [dreamed].
“Luck plays a big part in all of this, you get the right bounce or the wrong bounce and you don’t make out,” he added. “But I think it’s all about confidence. You go into new situations, and you carry your weight.”
‘What Jack would want us to do’
Welch had a major influence on another educational institution, providing Sacred Heart University’s business school with an endowment that would lead the Fairfield school to rename it the Welch College of Business & Technology.
If Welch’s name is attached to Sacred Heart today and not GE, he ranks alongside Connecticut’s other historic innovators who left legacies of lasting duration in the state, names like Frederick Rentschler, Igor Sikorsky and Bill Rasmussen of ESPN.
Welch led GE for two decades before handing the CEO role to his lieutenant Jeff Immelt on the eve of the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Immelt attempted to position GE for a new century of success, but ultimately unsuccessfully. After selling off core businesses like NBC Universal and GE Plastics based in Pittsfield, Mass., following the financial panic of 2008 Immelt would begin the dismantling of GE Capital, which at its peak employed thousands of people at offices in Stamford, Norwalk and Danbury.
In 2016, Immelt would move GE’s headquarters to Boston, justifying the decision on the need to reinvigorate the company’s engineering and entrepreneurial roots, with Sacred Heart University taking over the company’s Fairfield campus just off the Merritt Parkway. The board would replace Immelt within a year by his own lieutenant John Flannery, then brought in Culp in October 2018 on his vision for a revival of GE pegged to its corporate heritage of industrial innovation.
After retiring from GE, Welch moved to Massachusetts himself where he married Suzy Wetlaufer, an editor of the Harvard Business Review, who controversially began a romance while penning an article about Welch.
Welch was married twice previously, having four children with his first wife Carolyn, and after the couple’s 1987 divorce marrying Jane Beasley before divorcing again in 2003.
Born in Peabody, Mass. on Nov. 19, 1935, Welch grew up an only child in Salem. He studied chemical engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, graduating in 1957 and getting a doctorate in the discipline three years later from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
GE hired him that year and assigned him to Pittsfield, which would become a grooming station for future senior executives. He would win the top job in 1981 as the replacement for Reginald Jones, who moved into GE’s new corner office in Fairfield after the company moved it out of New York City amid a boom in suburban office park construction.
The jobs cuts followed, with Welch eliminating more than 100,000 over a half decade — many in middle management — and changing how managers were compensated for hitting business goals, including awards of GE stock and options to get them acting as shareholders would want the business run.
Investors would respond, sending GE shares up more than 40-fold during Welch’s two decades running the company, generating significant wealth for remaining employees and retirees who received those stock incentives.
Under Welch and Immelt, GE would prove a major benefactor in communities throughout Connecticut, whether through gifts from its philanthropic foundation or in commitments by its employees to area nonprofits. But GE’s fortunes would subside during the Immelt era, with the company how pinning its hopes on Culp to bring back the magic of the Welch era.
“Jack was larger than life and the heart of GE for half a century,” Culp stated. “He reshaped the face of our company and the business world. ... We’ll continue to honor his legacy by doing exactly what Jack would want us to do: win.”
Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
"lasting" - Google News
March 02, 2020 at 12:00PM
https://ift.tt/39hso9d
Welch leaves lasting imprint on Connecticut, Corporate America - CT Insider
"lasting" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2tpNDpA
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Welch leaves lasting imprint on Connecticut, Corporate America - CT Insider"
Post a Comment