Take on Jack Welch’s Strategic Leadership
Jack Welch is a former General Electric CEO. In the following video, he discussed running GE and taking it to an even bigger conglomerate. Because GE is a publicly traded company, all of its financial records are public. Also, this company is widely studied, and there is a lot of published work on its history, management leadership, and its performance. Your assignment in this term paper is to answer the following based on what we discussed this semester in Bus 481 and the publicly available resources.
What is your take on Jack Welch’s strategic leadership?
Discuss his strategy-making process for GE to be competitive.
Based on your independent research, what was the nature of the competitive advantage of GE under Jack Welch’s leadership?
The link to GE's intro https://www(dot)youtube(dot)com/watch?v=rADedqrVqSI
No cover page needed
What is your take on Jack Welch’s strategic leadership?
Welch’s strategic leadership is effective and lean. Also, his leadership was vision-led, which meant that Welch was aggressively chasing after his vision for the company. Everyone believed that the company was doing well, and making enough profits before his tenure. However, Welch was keen enough to notice that the company could be better. As the only person who had the vision for the company, Welch had to endure moments of uncertainty. However, his aggression paid off, as he was able to enhance the company even further.
I find that his strategic leadership was anchored by his honest approach. Welch believed that the company’s competitive edge would only improve if it was operating optimally. So, his decision to fire the bottom 10% of his employees as well as improve, or get rid of those companies that were not performing well, was a strategic move that further enhanced GE’s performance. As Fernandez-Araoz (2020) notes, Welch was honest about performance and values, and this greatly steered productivity in the right direction.
Discuss his strategy-making process for GE to be competitive.
Welch was well aware of ‘dead weight’ within GE. Also, he was well aware of the complacency that wa...