Jack Welch and His Management Style Pros/Cons

Jack Welch of General Electric

Introduction

General Electric has long been listed as one of America 's `most admired companies (GE , 2006 . It has grown into a diversified conglomerate far from its humble beginnings as a partnership between Thomas Alva Edison and Charles Coffin Welch 's Dynamic Moves

Indeed GE 's success can be attributed to the 20-year leadership of CEO Jack Welch from 1981 to 2000 . What is most striking here , that visibly shows how Welch 's leadership mattered to GE , was that two years after he retired , GE

's market value had fallen by 45 percent and the S

index decreased by 32 percent . Many people think that Welch leadership was opportunistic . He gained prominence after doing well in his initial job at the Plastics division of GE where the Vice President recognized his efforts . After he threatened to leave because of receiving a meager reward in recognition of his efforts , he was asked to stay . He worked within the system and was ranked as one of those candidates for CEO . It was said that he hated GE 's highly politicized and sanitized policies and he exploited the system while doing his hard work (Case Study : Jack Welch 's Creative Revolutionary Transformation of General Electric and the Thermidorean Reaction

Early Talent Development at General Electric

Early talent development at General Electric was created to attune to the needs of creating various managerial positions during a vigorous growth stage . The earliest measures taken by Charles Coffin when he succeeded Edison as CEO in 1892 involved the implementation of a merit-based system of rewards based on performance that was already measurable at that time . Therefore one can assume that the company already had in place employee evaluation systems as early as Coffin 's tenure (Bartlett and McLean , 2003 . This initial foray into building talent in the company paved the way for the measures taken by his successors towards the same . During the tenure of Jack Welch , more and more Crotonville courses were designed for promotions . Also , he had stopped recruiting from Ivy League and other prominent colleges and universities , and had created a special group for internal consulting and most of these consultants evolved into managers of the firm Moreover , Welch had initiated a change in culture- managers had to be in-born and bred . They had to work their way up from the bottom , and had to accept relocation moves in their career in to climb the corporate ladder . Also , Welch moved the EMS consultants to the field offices , so that they could better monitor candidates for promotion . To further trim down the list of candidates to those who were deemed suitable for higher positions , Welch developed a manager matrix that would classify managers according to their performance , and that would enable the firm to tell the bottom class managers to either improve or leave the company . Managers were then classified according to a `vitality curve , with the same `sentence ' for the bottom 10 employees along the curve...