Jack Welch Video

I found the video of former GE CEO Jack Welch is fascinating. Mr. Welch had developed procedures to speed decision cycles, move information through the organization, provide quick and effective feedback, and evaluate and reward managers on qualities such as openness, candor, and self-confidence.

Mr. Welch steered a transformation of attitudes at GE- in his words, to release “emotional energy” at all levels of the organization and encourage creativity and feelings of ownership and self-worth. His ultimate goal was to create an enterprise that can tap the benefits of global scale and diversity without the stifling costs of bureaucratic controls and hierarchical authority and without a managerial focus on personal power and self-perpetuation. This requires a transformation not only of systems and procedures, but also of people themselves.

Good leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. Above all else, though, good leaders are open. They go up, down, and around their organization to reach people. They don’t stick to the established channels. They’re informal. They’re straight with people. They make a religion out of being accessible.

Real leaders don’t need clutter. People must have the self-confidence to be clear, precise, to be sure that every person in their organization—highest to lowest—understands what the business is trying to achieve. The challenge is to move that sense of ownership, that commitment to relentless personal interaction and immediate sharing of information, down through the organization. Incremental assignment can’t build a great team. Given them they couldn’t think they can do, when they do it, they get self-confidence.

Regarding 20-70-10 policy, in reality, we can see it has been implemented most of the places differently. In some situations, it just takes more time, or, because of labor laws, it costs more to let people go. In my opinion it should not occur until an appraisal system has been in place for few years and the employee given enough opportunity to excel.

I totally agree, if people are given a chance to take a swing that helps to build their confidence.
Sometimes people get hesitated to do some challenging, high visible, time constraint projects. But when they are provided with liberty to do their own way, they gain confidence while implementing it.

It is not easy to cut the bureaucracy and avoid resistors to embrace for changes. This has been and will always be major hindrance for any organization.