Executive Leadership Profiles

Jack Welch was born in an Irish-Catholic family in Massachusetts. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1957 (BS chemical engineering). He received his M.S. and Ph.D at the University of Illinois in 1960.

Welch joined General Electric in 1960. He worked as a junior engineer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was displeased with the raise he was offered after his first year, and with the strict bureaucracy within GE. He planned to leave GE and join International Minerals & Chemicals.

However, Reuben Gutoff, a young GE executive, decided that Welch was too valuable a resource for the company to lose. Gutoff vowed to work to change the bureaucracy to create the small-company environment Welch thought critical to its future success.

Welch was named vice president of GE in 1972. He moved up the ranks to become senior vice president in 1977 and vice chairman in 1979. He became GE’s youngest chairman and CEO in 1981, succeeding Reginald H. Jones. By 1982, Welch had disassembled much of the earlier management put together by Jones.

GE’s CEO

Through the 1980s, Welch worked to streamline GE and make it a more competitive company. He pushed the managers of the businesses he decided to keep to become ever more productive. Welch worked to eradicate inefficiency by trimming inventories and dismantling the bureaucracy that had almost led him to leave GE. He shut down factories, reduced payrolls and cut lackluster units. Although he was initially treated with contempt by those under him for his policies, they eventually grew to respect him. Welch’s cost-cutting and productivity improvement strategies were later adopted by other CEOs across corporate America.

Part of his formula was that each year, Welch would fire the bottom 10% of his managers. He earned a reputation for brutal candor in his meetings with executives. He would push his managers to perform, but he would reward those in the top 20% with bonuses and stock options. He expanded the breadth of the stock options program at GE from applying only to top executives to a program for nearly one third of all employees. Welch is also known for destroying the nine-layer management hierarchy and bringing a sense of informality to the company.

In the early 1980s he was dubbed “Neutron Jack” (in reference to the neutron bomb) for eliminating employees while leaving buildings intact. The chapter “the neutron years” in his book says that GE had 411,000 employees at the end of 1980, and 299,000 at the end of 1985. Of the 112,000 who left the payroll, 37,000 were in sold businesses, and 81,000 were reduced in continuing businesses. In return, GE had increased its market capital tremendously.

In 1986, GE acquired NBC. During the 90’s, Welch helped to modernize GE by emphasizing a shift from manufacturing to services. He also made hundreds of acquisitions and made a push to dominate markets abroad. Welch adopted the Six Sigma quality program in late 1995. In 1999 he was named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine.

Welch led the company to massive revenue increases. In 1980, the year before Welch became CEO, GE recorded revenues of roughly $26.8 billion; in 2000, the year before he left, they were nearly $130 billion. When Jack Welch left GE the company had gone from a market value of $14 billion to one of more than $410 billion, making it the most valuable and largest company in the world, up from America’s tenth largest by market cap in 1981.

In a 2004 interview (IMNO ), Jack Welch offered the following insights:

What advice would you give to aspiring professionals?

Whenever you get more education, you add another notch to your belt. So, get as much as possible. As far as work, do what you enjoy. You’ll be much more successful if you like what you are doing. It is not good to take a job solely for reasons like parents, prestige, or friends. Go where your passion and joy are.

How do people know if they have what it takes to become a CEO?

They won’t. They will have a series of experiences that will build their self-confidence, and as they build their self-confidence their whole presence or persona will either grow or not grow. For example, you write stories now, when you wrote your first story, it was a lot harder than when you write one now. That’s what happens to a CEO. They go through a series of experiences and they either build enormous self-confidence or not.

How can a newly graduated MBA student excel and move up the company?

Like anybody without an MBA, they never do what they are asked, they always do more. If somebody asks them a question about this magazine, they give a competitive view on all the magazines. If your boss asks you a question, he or she often knows the answer; they usually just want you to confirm it. When he or she asks you a question, give them “A” plus everything else. If you receive a PR question, you give a comparison of the size of PR outputs in other firms; some cases they went through; who ran a good one and who didn’t; how long the PR person should be the head of PR, etc. To excel, you have got to give more than just simply saying, “Our PR department has five people with this much overhead, etc…” Blow them away with thorough, actionable information!

Every time you make your boss look good, you get chips in the bag. You need to let your boss know he or she can count on you to be there when needed and you will manage your public life in such a way that you will always be there. On the other hand, he will give you flexibility if you’re always delivering. But no company policy is ever going to give you flextime. The only thing that is going to give you flextime is chips in the bag with management.

See also the Wikipedia Page on Jack Welch which was the source for much of this profile. 

Pope John Paul II was born Karol Józef Wojtyla, May 18, 1920. He reigned as Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from October 16, 1978 until his death on April 2, 2005, more than 26 years. He was the first, and only Polish Pope and the first non-Italian Pope since the 16th century.

He is often credited as one of the forces which contributed to the fall of Communism, and his early reign was marked by his opposition to it and his support of the Polish Solidarity movement. During his reign, the pope travelled to more than 100 countries, more than any previous pope. He is said to have canonized more people than all popes before him put together. His reign is characterized as a time in which Catholicism’s influence declined in developed countries but expanded in the Third World.

Pope John Paul II was extremely popular worldwide, attracting the largest crowds in history. When crowds of millions would chant “John Paul Two, We love you!” he would often respond “John Paul Two… he loves you.” John Paul II was fluent in numerous languages: his native Polish and also Italian, French, German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Croatian and Latin.

Pope John Paul II. Photo courtesy of the American Bible Society

In 1992, he was diagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease. On 2 April 2005, Pope John Paul II died as a vast crowd kept vigil in St Peter’s Square below.

The last years of his reign had been marked by his fight against the various diseases ailing him, provoking some concerns that he should abdicate.

John Paul II directed the moral emphasis of the Roman Catholic Church and the larger christian community. He emphasized what he called the “universal call to holiness.” He spoke out against ideologies and politics of communism, socialism, feminism, imperialism, materialism, racism and unrestrained capitalism. At the heart of it, his understanding of his role was to lead the fight against oppression, secularism and poverty.

He struggled against the corrosive spiritual effects of modern Western consumerism and the widespread secular and hedonistic orientation of Western populations. to do this, John Paul II affirmed traditional Catholic teachings by opposing abortion, contraception, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, euthanasia, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and unjust wars. He also defended traditional teachings on marriage and gender roles by opposing divorce, same-sex marriage and the ordination of women. His conservative views were sometimes criticized as regressive. John Paul II called upon followers to vote according to Catholic teachings.

John Paul II became known as the “Pilgrim Pope.” According to John Paul II, the trips symbolized bridge-building efforts between nations and religions, attempting to remove divisions created through history.

He beatified 1,340 people, more people than any previous pope. The Vatican asserts he canonized more people than the combined tally of his
predecessors during the last five centuries, and from a far greater variety of cultures. The abolition of the office of Promotor Fidei (”Promoter of the Faith” and the origin of the term Devil’s Advocate) streamlined the process and allowed for the great increase in beatifications.

In February, 2004 Pope John Paul II was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize honoring his life’s work in opposing Communist oppression and helping to reshape the world. The last years of his reign had been marked by his fight against the various diseases ailing him, provoking some concerns that he should abdicate.

Pope John Paul II died on 2 April 2005 after a long fight against Parkinson’s disease and other illnesses. Both L’Osservatore Romano and Pope Benedict XVI, Pope John Paul II’s successor, referred to John Paul II as “Great”.

John Paul II was succeeded by the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany, the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith who had led the Funeral Mass for John Paul II.

Qualities of Organizational Leadership:

Charisma

From “The Making of Popes 1978,” (Andrew M. Greeley) offers a close-up of the pope working a crowd: “His moves, his presence, his smile, his friendliness, his gestures …have pleased everyone… He is great with crowds — shaking hands, smiling, talking, kissing babies.”

Organizational Expertise

We can see how in the beatification process, his understanding of the organization allowed him to streamline it, so that a backlog of decades was cleared up in the system for certifying “saints.”

Succession Planning

It seems clear that John Paul II groomed Cardinal Ratzinger to become his successor so that the reforms he undertook could be continued and solidified as sources of the future strengths of the Catholic Church.

See also:

• The Wikipedia page on John Paul II from which much of the factual information was excerpted.
• CNN Biography of Pope John Paul II