Jack: Straight from the Gut | Jack Welch, John A. Byrne | Great insight from a superstar CEO

Jack: Straight from the Gut | Jack Welch, John A. Byrne | A Must Read For Managers

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Jack: Straight fro...

	Jack: Straight from the Gut Jack Welch, John A. Byrne Business Plus, 2003 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 258 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great insight from a superstar CEO

When I become aware of a person, I really want to know where they came from. What did they start out as? How did they get to where they got?

Were they born rich and just got richer? (Trump and Gates, for instance.)

Were they splitting rails like Abe Lincoln?

In the case of this book, Jack Welch was born to relatively modest beginnings and became one of the most powerful men in the world.

I found this book to be a great story of a man who went on to lead a giant corporation and gain status as a superstar CEO.

It was, to me, a fascinating book.

Good stuff about what it's like to play in the big leagues.

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A Must Read For Managers

If you are a manager or aspiring to be one, go ahead and read this one. Need not follow all what jack is telling you in the book but i am sure you would want to follow some of them. Who else is a better person to tell those other than Jack who has gone through all of that. Another great read is his Winning.

Good book for managers and business people even though I'm not one of them

As a testament to my ignorance, I picked up this book without knowing who the author was. I learned pretty quickly about Jack Welch and his time as an engineer, manager, and then CEO of General Electric.

Kudos to Welch for having realized that those companies that do not adapt to new business realities are doomed, first to non-performance, and then to failure. He certainly saved GE, one of America's great companies, from stagnation if not death. He realized GE would have to expand its business to sectors outside of GE's previous operations, and maybe even scale back or sell off the traditional businesses. Many people criticized him for this. Today, those same people worship him. My company now uses software developed by GE for our day to day operations. In previous decades, most people knew they only made refrigerators and light bulbs.

Welch was also criticized for liberally firing people. So many people lost their jobs when GE took over certain companies that he was called `Neutron Jack'. I feel for those people, but Welch calls the firings necessary. Welch also let many non-performing managers go. I don't feel for these people. I wish my company did the same thing. I am tired of having to pick up slack for non-performers.

A frown to Welch for one thing: resisting the government mandated clean up of the Hudson River. Welch was furious at an employee for having admitted that the company was responsible for polluting the Hudson River with dioxins. He should have owned up and cleaned it up.

This book is lacking in that it gives only impressions on how to manage a company. Very superficial. But then it doesn't really promise specifics either, and such a book probably would take several more volumes and be boring anyway. There are many useful insights and take-away generalizations that make this book worthwhile.

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Long read, but where is the divesity, Jack?

This is a long book, a great fabulous story on leadership, integrity, meritrocracy, and corporate america. The stories were very interesting. I am giving it a 3-star. The names of everyone was hard to keep up with, but they were characters in the stories. I enjoyed so much to hear more than anything one thing: That rewards & recognition & advancement in GE are results-oriented. The intolerance of Jack for bureacracy was refreshing. The move to six-sigma and quality was aligned with what I hoped would result with good execution. However, with as much vision and tenacity and knack for change that Jack had, I am baffled and shocked that he did not have any women on his staff, any diversity whatsoever except for the white male, and that he did not even CONSIDER women for positions, it certainly never came up in the book and he made sure to name every single person that ever worked for him. Where are the women Jack? Where is the diversity? Where is the TRUE rewards and recognition for everyone who works hard, delivers results and top performance that moves the company to the next level - was GE not even looking at women or promoting women or was it such a foreign concept even in the 1980s and 1990s? Even then, I would have had higher expectations of such a visionary man.

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Over 239 customer reviews..

..yet one more won't hurt?!

I finally got some time off from travel and got around to finishing Jack's biography

Peppered with anecdotes and `stories' of one of the most charismatic CEOs of his time, the biography makes for an interesting read. Though the narrative and stories are great, they don't really go deep enough. For instance, coverage of GE's globalization or offshoring initiatives in India would perhaps require a book in itself, not a few pages in the book.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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